Vitrium Systems

A decade ago, Adobe and future merger partner Glassbook published Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, a 16,000-word short story, as the first major eBook. Its digital rights management (DRM) failed as hackers hacked, King got mad, Amazon ended up giving it away. The eBook—and DRM—suffered a brutally black eye.

About the same time, iTunes rose and record labels struggled to rein in MP3 music pirates, DRM as a technology got beat up badly, caught in a riptide between freethinking music consumers and bottom-line-oriented copyright owners.

Adobe, somewhat quietly, released a product called Policy Server (currently part of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite), and later, Digital Editions, to rights-manage documents and eBooks. Even it wasn’t without hitches, as arguments over text-to-speech features erupted between publishers—who reap revenue from audio books—and advocates for visually impaired readers.

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By Don Fluckinger

The flagging economy launched torpedoes at the grand old-media Condé Nast fleet yesterday, sinking Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. The moves—including a rumored 180 layoffs connected to those magazines—come as the publishing industry struggles to invent new models to derive income from its content, one of them rumored to be a Hulu-type digital store.

Help is on the way, and indeed it may already be here for some beleaguered publishers.

Interactive PDFs are an emerging format for porting paper publications to electronic editions. Not only do PDFs incur zero printing and shipping costs, they also lock down layouts for advertisers and magazine designers frustrated with graphic-design limitations posed by the user-controllable look and feel of web browsers. Their main drawback? They tend to be money losers or zero-gainers.

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