As a reminder that “mobile” means so much more than “cellphone,” the newest entry to the e-reader space comes out this month. The specs look pretty good – 11.5″ screen, 1200×1600 resolution, touchscreen navigation, 4gigs with SD card expansion, 1/4 inch thick and the batteries last a week.
So far, so good. It’s even flexible.
My main fear, however, is that since this is coming out in connection with the Hearst Corporation, they’re going to saddle this otherwise peachy-keen device with a whole buncha maddening DRM crippleware that’s going to ruin the User Experience.
This is not just paranoia – it’s the sad result of buying an early version of Windows Vista loaded onto a Sony Vaio. Back in the spring of 2007, the hardware companies, particularly the arm of Sony (where the movie/music/TV guys were screaming like banshees about online piracy), put all manner of toxic DRM into their products. Here’s a small sampling:
Certain high-quality output paths–audio and video–are reserved for protected peripheral devices. Sometimes output quality is artificially degraded; sometimes output is prevented entirely. And Vista continuously spends CPU time monitoring itself, trying to figure out if you’re doing something that it thinks you shouldn’t. If it does, it limits functionality and in extreme cases restarts just the video subsystem.
With the hysteria over paid content (i.e. charging consumers to read stories that used to be ad-supported), I fear that once again, we’re going to have the legacy side of media companies cramming paranoid DRM down the consumer’s throats, trying to simultaneously preserve the paper circulation, while throwing a meatless bone to the future of their media. Of course, all this really does is incentivize pirates to come up with cracks & hacks to strip off the DRM.
