Thursday, August 13, 2009

Sony to finally bury BBeb

The news that Sony are to scrap their proprietary BBeB format and focus on epub, is both good news and long overdue. It begs the question why they ever thought that their format was ever going to cut it and like many Sony formats before them has proved a bridge too far.We have never been asked to provide the BBeB format.

In adopting Adobe’s ACS4 digital rights management Sony were the first to embrace epub with encrypted protection and also Adobe ebooks which are also fully compatible with ACS4 and the Sony Reader.

It is easy to see both these formats, one PDF based and the other XML, being the dominate formats outside of fortress Kindle. Many of the ‘lookie likie’ eink readers are now openly adopting ACS4 which whilst DRM is still the requirement is the key to providing secure open files that are interoperable between devices.

We presume that Sony will offer customers who have BBeB files a migration in their announcement.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It doesn't make me happy since I own a PRS-500 which reads only lrf files. The new PRS-300, PRS-600, and PRS-900 still read lrf files, probably for backward compability. I would like a program for my pc that can convert ePub and Adobe drm files to lrf drm files. This certainly seems reasonable and possible since the resulting files would still be rights protected.

Anonymous said...

I checked the Sony website and it is possible to upgrade the PRS-500 to read the new format, although you will have to send it to Sony for the upgrade.