I was in a similar boat, and wound up getting a regular ereader and a tablet. My ereader is small and sturdy enough to go everywhere, while my tablet is larger and has games and PDFs for when I have a sitdown moment. I put everything on the tablet and the mostly-text books on the ereader.

The problem is that competing paper and tablet products are good enough that manufacturers simply skipped larger ereaders. Sony was coming out with something interesting in Japan that had a flexible display, but since they're getting out of ereaders who knows what that will come to. There's also been advances in LCDs to reduce eyestrain, but those are years away from production.
You and me both.

Most ereaders can read a generic format, and then are locked into a specific bookstore. EX: Kindles can read regular DRM-free .mobi files, but can only buy books from Amazon's store. The solution to getting an epub file onto a Kindle involves cracking the DRM and converting. This is trivially easy, but does required a basic level of awareness and computer confidence. Adobe's upgrade is apparently designed in response to the trivial ease of cracking their DRM.

The current situation of competing vendor-specific DRM schemes was partially the result of the first Adobe upgrade, where Adobe proved they weren't interested in providing reliable infrastructure for the bookstores. After that, the big players came up with their own DRM schemes.

Adobe is so irrelevant in the US now that I can only see this upgrade reinforcing the lesson to have an in-house DRM solution. Many smaller ebook sellers are already interested in going DRM-free so they don't have to pay Adobe fees and deal with Adobe's bad customer support. This may push some over that edge, but it will also probably drive some out of business as they have to pay for new servers and handle customer complaints.

Libraries, including openlibrary.org which has many books not available elsewhere, are really going to get shafted. They have neither the technical expertise nor the money to deal with this. They may well not even be aware of it. But they're going to be the front line when Gramps has a problem with his ebook checkouts.

From the article I didn'r really understand how that would work. There seems to be a new version of the DRM used on epub files and if readers do not get a firmware upgrade than they will not be able to decode books sold with the new version of the DRM. But it shouldn't mean that any previously purchased book, which cannot have the new version of the DRM because it isn't out yet, cannot be read anymore by the e-readers.

So if your devices gets an ugrade you should be fine. If not but if the bookstore sells books still in the old format then there is also no problem. Only if the bookstores upgrades but the device not then probably the device gets useless for future purchases and you shouldn't do it. A new e-reader might be an option although a costly but most probably you could transfer the old books to the new device. In such a case I would be angry as well.

All in all it shows that relying on an additional device to access simple information data like a book has its disadvantages too.

P.S.: I think Adobe are loosers anyway because last year they lost my login data and didn't even bother to inform me these morons.

Well, if Adobe is going to push a new iteration of PDF's and other formats with DRM, I'll just do what I always do in those situations and opt-out. Fuck that shit! I can always find copies of books sans-DRM anyways.

This is a good example of why DRM is just dumb : All it does is make the would-be honest customers skirt the legal means of acquiring the media for sale and become, in essence, criminals (used loosely in context) to be able to do what they spent their money on without the annoyance. Treating of customers as criminals via DRM just ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Brilliant business strategy!

I’ve first stumbled across ebook readers when my sister bought Sony PRS-T1 and asked me for help as she couldn’t read ebooks she purchased from one of polish ebook stores. After a bit googling it appeared to me that those books were protected by Adobe Editions DRM. I was able to solve her problems and authorized reader and her laptop (not entirely hassle-free) and although I was just AMAZED by the device itself I was rather discouraged to buy one for myself because of the ebooks protection method. Luckily it appeared later that this store was rather bad exception not standard for ebook market in Poland as most sellers just watermark files here. So all in all I bought myself e-reader and it was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Only a few months later I found out that almost all Adobe Editions protected ebooks in the store I mentioned were replaced by their watermarked copies :-P.

And now I reading about Adobe ‘innovations’ for the second time I’m happy I live in Poland.

Will just have to rely on what a colleague told me on that subject. There are quite a few e_readers that would be left unsupported. Most of them are e_readers sold under "white" brands ( supermarket or store proprietary brands for instance ), then those of brands that ceased trade and then the older models from the bigger brands. The problem would indeed be when the user would try to buy new books or redownload a book from his bookstore account and would only have access to files with the latest increment of Adobe's drm.

As for me, I prefer to read e-books on my 10 inches tablet anyway , store them on a 32 Gb SD and most books I have are from the public domain. But that will make me think twice before buying any costly e-book ( I was considering buying one by the way, will get the paper version instead )

I as well, especially with art books. But as a compulsive bibliophile I just don't have physical space for all my books anymore. Hence my need to go digital often. And I love the idea of being on vacation with literally hundreds of books to choose from.

"Adobe is betting that their new book encryption will not be broken, due to them not sharing the source code of the new book format."... I strongly remember reading this about AACS. And it was broken in less than 6 months.

just matter of time... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2KmJMKFrQ#t=84

Someday the detestible Steam platform will die, and there will be an epic butthurt of people who can't play their games anymore (especially the Steamworks titles), and it will be 100% their own fault for buying into a DRM platform.

Well, in fact, I happen to have a wide variety of books at home. Some books printed in the 70's and 80's age badly , sometimes more than my napoleonic era prints of latin and greek classics. Does paper quality count as DRM ?

This is the biggest reason why I remove the DRM from every Amazon eBook I own as soon as I purchase it. I also convert them to epub and mobi. How small the file sizes are, it's not a problem having 3 copies of the same file. I wish I would have had the foresight to do this with my .lit eBook purchases. But all the books I have locked in that format, I pirated from that great library on the bay.

I'd say it counts as built-in obsolescence if nothing else. Many paperbacks from the 70s now qualify as bioweapons, as anyone familiar with that yellow hue and unmistakable odour will verify.

Steam has a clause in effect it will aloow the on the fly offline decryption of the launch EXE's for all titles that use SteamWorks. Its in the EULA for steam and all devs must adhere to this when they launch a product.

I never liked e-books, I prefer reading books physically and I really miss Borders :(