A Study of ePub-based Standard Framework Supporting Mutual Comparability of eBook DRM
Ho-Gap Kang, Tae-Hyun Kim, Hee-Don Yoon, SeongHwan Cho · The Journal of the Institute of Webcasting, Internet and Telecommunication · 2011
EBooks refer to electronic versions of books which are accessible via internet with forms of digital texts. In recent years, Amazon's Kindle digital eBooks has revealed the possibilities of success of the e-book market, which leads other companies to launch eBook service such as Google's eBook stores and Apple's iPad and eBook service. These reveal that the eBook market is finally showing a substantial amount of growth. Although the issue of technical support of eBook copyright protection emerges from the fast growing eBook marketplace, current technic of commercial DRM for protecting eBook copyright protection still has problems of non-comparability. Therefore, with the current technical status, DRM comparability problems, which have already occurred in music DRM environment, would also happen in eBook environment. This study suggests a standard framework to support eBook DRM comparability. When development of the standard reference software for eBook DRM comparability is completed, the sources will be registered as shareware to be open to public.