Secondly:
“* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses”

This sounds suspiciously like a right to make unlimited copies. You can already choose which format/platform to buy the e-book in/for, so if that is the point it already exists.

The whole “bill of rights” seems to be anti-copyright. And the typical entitlement crap that people who frequent Kindle forums spew across the internet.

Now, I’m not one to defend outdated business practices, but put yourself in Joe Librarian’s position. They don’t understand DRM any more than the person standing in front of them with their nook does. I can’t tell you how often we field the question “What do you mean it’s checked out, it’s electronic, can’t anyone get it?” Then imagine trying to defend a boycott of DRM media to the city council or library board who may not understand a computer, much less DRM. All the end user sees it library dropping services. The library is not a political platform.

That is to say “the library” not “all libraries”. If ALA or another organization can get involved in this, it becomes a much more potent issue.

I imagine this will shake out to a pay per year type model, similar to how magazine content is licensed. Libraries are used to paying an annual fee for serials, now they will for ebooks as well. It seems the best way to address both the access and the revenue issues.

To some degree, the ePub format addresses these concerns, and I hope to see publishers continue to move toward a common platform.

As for “reader” vs. “user,” I can see both sides. If you listen to a book, are you a reader? I say yes, some dead-tree format enthusiasts say no. We tried to make it as inclusive as possible by saying “user.” But users do include readers, most definitely.

All of these comments and conversations are fabulous, and exactly what we wanted when we released this. Say where you agree and where you disagree. The more voices the better. The important thing is that the conversation is happening and publishers and authors are taking part.

I see your point about one format, but that means every publisher and chain in the whole world agreeing to it. And that also means having supersensitive DRM that ensures you only have one copy at a time.

And you choose the format when you buy, just like a buyer of paper books chooses between Hardcover, Trade Paperback and Mass Market Paperback.
Why should e-book buyers have the right to “update” their version, if I buy a Hardcover book, I can’t trade it in for the revised edition that comes five years later.

If however a format should go “extinct”, I think there should be some means to get the e-book for free on another format.

I do think that there could be a tradeoff between “right to resell” and other digital ownership schemes. If, say, B&N archives your purchases, allowing you to access them on multiple devices and allowing you to reacquire them for free if you shift devices or lose your copies, is that “worth” trading right of resale?

I mean, I sell nooks. I explain to people who ask if they can resell their ebooks, “No, but on the other hand, you can’t lose them, either. If you change devices, or lose your nook, or delete the file, you can always get another copy from your account. It’s a different form of ownership, with different benefits.”

I’m not opposed to a right of resale (in any way), but I’m not convinced that it is a non-negotiable right, either. Would people consider a lower price, or transferrable, accessible files, to be something that you might be willing to trade for a right of resale?

I mean, at our store, we have books (real, physical books!) which are marked down for clearance. We normally will take books back for return, but we sell these at a lower price with the caveat that they are not returnable. People seem ok to trade one benefit (returns) for another (lower price).

These “rights” need some work.

I’m perfectly fine not breaking copyright law as long as I can freely use the ebooks I own. I need to index them, I need to read them, I need to transform them into different formats. I can’t do any of that with the suggestions put forth by this bill of rights.

1. The right to transform — I must be able to read the ebook on any devices I have for any reason.

2. The right to access the data of an ebook — I must not be hindered in reading the ebook in any way. No endeavor or software should be denied access to ebooks that I have purchased. This means no DRM. This means I should not have to tool software to pander to pathetic DRM. Use copyright law to punish me if I violate it, but don’t use it to bind me to arbitrary restrictions.

3. The right to produce meta-data. I must be able to read, index, cross-reference and analyze said ebook.

The right to share via fair use is already granted, what should be given as a right is the ability to extract such information. If there is no DRM then my ability to extract anything for fair use is unhindered.

Let’s analyze this supposed bill of rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses

Favor? What kind of weak language is that. Don’t restrict my use of the ebook. If I violate copyright sue me. Why accept proprietarization? Don’t meet them half way! Also the 2nd clause is redundant.

* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright

This is a right you already have. If the ebook was electronically readable and DRM free you wouldn’t need this exception.

* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

This is dumb. Really dumb. You’re trying to apply non-digital semantics to the digital world. This will have unforeseen effects is far too conservative an interpretation. If I have software embedded in my ebook then it has to follow these rules of first doctrine sale? This is broad and overreaching, it also fails to foresee the future.

Treat ebooks as digital files. This means that lending doesn’t make sense. If we’ve enforced no-DRM then there’s no physical or mechanical method to enforce this. You might argue that you could photocopy a book. That costs time and money. To copy a digital file is near 0 cost in all these respects. Do not pretend digital files are anything but what they are, don’t apply false semantics to them that are not inherent to their nature. Lending does not work if you ban DRM. To suggest otherwise is quite naive or requires too much stupid infrastructure and integration to prove I’m not reading a book.

Ebooks have new properties, it is time to accept that they aren’t books.

That is, the Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc. are the readers. The people doing the reading are the users.

I bought an RCA REB 1100 reader more than ten years ago. Anyone remember those? Thought not. Those devices stopped being supported about two years after I bought one; I had to go through quite a few hoops to strip off the DRM so I could get to my books via other devices.

That’s why I make it a practice to strip the DRM off every ebook I buy now, and convert it (if at all possible, and if necessary) to EPUB. But the average consumer probably doesn’t have the same POV regarding ebooks, which means that a platform crapping out can actually be a fairly serious problem.

I agree with other comments about reselling ebooks. How can you be sure they’re actually running on one legitimate account? How can you be sure they were deleted from one system before being sold for use on another, by someone else?

Finally, I actually do agree with the idea that they should be universally readable. I have a Sony PRS-300 (the teeny ebook reader) that I use if I want to read in daylight, and I have the pad if I want to read indoors or under lower light conditions. I shouldn’t have to jump through any hoops to do any sort of file transfers. That is, I shouldn’t have to strip off the Kindle DRM and convert the PRC to EPUB before I can even copy the blessed thing to the Sony. It’s certainly not as difficult to get an MP3 to play back on different devices…

Copyright expires. So should DRM. And at the same time.

Look at what has happened with music for instance. A few years ago, you could only buy music online with some kind of DRM that prevented you to listen to your music on the platform of you choice. Today you can buy MP3 without DRMs. You can copy those files as much as like, and you can use them on any device (if we disregard the patent issue for a moment). AFAIK, in most country it is legal to have a copy on your PC, a copy on you portable media player and a copy on your auto radio. But that does not make it legal to share the file with an unlimited number of people online: it might or might not be legal, even if unlimited copy for your personal use are allowed.

And of course, as long a pirated ebook is more useful than a legal one crippled with DRM, people will use the pirated one….

Publishers, librarians, and users are all guilty of trying to shoehorn the dead-tree model onto digital models.

Maybe the first sale doctrine should not apply. If we should embrace nearly-free infinite copies, as the technology enables, then resale is irrelevant at best.

Publishers used to pay amounts for printing, warehousing, distributing, etc., that often went to waste. Absent those costs, not only should the price be lower, but the availability should be universal.

The future of reading is digital. The dead-tree model for books will be abandoned as easily as it was for newspapers.

We need to support the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of this new system.

In fact there really is an authorial issue there for any author who’d like his or her body of work to survive.

1) Trust users
2) Verify, embedding (securely) information about the source, then use the courts when something leaks.

Anything on general purpose hardware can be hacked. Anything on special purpose hardware can be hacked (the 3DS was already partially broken RELEASE DAY)

There is no way to stop pirates, not even theoretically. DRM is impossible, period – the trusted user and the attacker are one and the same.

What I don’t understand is why the DRM is not in the Hardware, like with consoles. You have to add hardware (as far as I know) to run pirated software on consoles, and this is detectable. -Xbox
Live blocked over 100,000 users who had done that.

Such a system would deter all but the most hardened pirates, and you would be able to use any legal software, in this case e-book, on any hardware platform.

Eh…e-books are books. And the book is the story.

And if you are interested in; “…the piece of content that my favourite writer worked hard on to create and have edited.” , you should be interested in paying that author for the work.

The work comes in several formats, if you want more than one format you have to buy more than one format.
That is how it is with every piece of goods ever produced. Just because it is easy to copy something that is in an electronic format, doesn’t give you the right to do so.

It’s also worth remembering that copyright is supposed to strike the best balance between the public interest and the incentive for creative work to be produced. An analogy between different eBook formats and different editions of a book is meaningless, because the content has changed in the latter – what we’re talking about is different formats to hold the same content, and keep it portable between our devices. If one person technically has two copies, one on the laptop and one on the eReader, in different formats, that’s no violation of the spirit of copyright, even if the publisher could theoretically make more money by artificially restricting my choice.

I pay for the data in the file, not for the particular wrapper that allows it to be read by a certain device. I think there are few authors who would begrudge my ability to take my legally purchased data and put it in a new wrapper, whatever the publishers may say, and I care far more about the rights of the creators than of the middle men. Those middle men do some good work, I admit, but they are also harming the market in an attempt to stem the decline of their relevance. Anyone who writes can now distribute and market for themselves, should they so choose; that choice used to require a very significant financial commitment. The print market and the big distributors still hold sway, so publishers remain important to a degree, but that degree is slowly waning. That’s the real issue at hand here.

Why should I pay twice for two formats, if I’m the one willing to make the conversion? I’m not being facetious, I genuinely don’t understand your viewpoint. I pay, say, $10 for an eBook in epub format – that $10 compensates the author for their time spent writing the words, the editor for their time editing, and so forth. I then want it in pdf format – I’ve already paid the author, the editor, and so on once, so why would I be required to pay them again if I take that content that I’ve paid for and run it through a program to alter how it’s rendered by my computer?

What you’re saying is precisely equivalent to claiming that if I buy a CD I shouldn’t be allowed to rip it to MP3 to use on my iPod, but should have to purchase a secondary copy in the secondary format. Even the record labels have long since given up on that argument.

If users can be trusted you don’t need DRM. And that DRM does not prevent those that want to copy from doing so means users can’t be trusted even with DRM.
Congratulations, you have just made the argument that e-books should not exist.

And as for your other argument:
“Anyone who writes can now distribute and market for themselves, should they so choose; that choice used to require a very significant financial commitment.”

Acording to Joe Konrath, champion of electronic self publishing, it costs from $3,300 (+converting) to have a 100,000 word novel edited and a cover made. If you add to that the costs for marketing, it is still a substantial investment to get material that can compare to what the publisher’s put out before the public.

Nothing has substantially changed since the invention of the printing press apart from the ease of making, and distributing, copies electronically.

I recently bought some 15 e-books included as a medical residency course. All of them edited by McGraw-Hill and can only be used through a proprietary platform called Vital Source Bookshelf
http://www.vitalsource.com/
The eBooks have the .vbk file extensions. I installed the Bookshelf software on my Desktop and Laptop PCs, recently I had to reinstall the OS on my Laptop and because I had installed on 2 PCs the bookshelf software, I couldn’t open the books on my laptop.
If I bought the books I should have the right to open them whenever and wherever I want. I hate those closed file types like .vbk, I swear I will never buy again DRM books.

We can make a reasonable e-book reader policy -IF- we do NOT buy a product. Buy a product, complain about the price, you’ve already given money to the people who make the product, taking $ from those that might make a better one.

Right now, with this recession and due to squabbling even the government choking at new bailouts, we can make or break these characters. This is where word of mouth, stickers/posters in rl, manifestos handed out, etc. will really go far.