I got a bit discouraged when I contacted the ebook retailer last night when he said technicians are not that important in the IT industry. He said contents and users are the most important keys for the IT industry today. Well, that's somewhat true, but that's just too discouraging for us technicians. The guy is actually my first entrepreneur friend and I find him quite trustful. However, we had conflicts when we discussed whether to make it a platform for all or simply an app for his company. Honestly, I wish we can make it big by allowing many people involve in the content contribution, either by allowing all users to upload and share or allowing retailers to sells their books on our platform. As I know from Shucang's CEO, it's legal for a site to reformat, save and share. We can handle the conflicts if people claim for abuse(delete the database immediately). However, if we try to allow retailers to sell books on our platform, we've got to develop secure DRM system to protect their ebooks. It won't be easy. As Shucang has spent years to develop their own DRM system(http://www.epubsys.com/en/), I don't think we'll have that much time to develop it on our own. For HTML5 ebook readers, copy-right protection will even be harder. Let alone we unzipped the epub and reformatted the whole thing. Probably we'll make it uploadable for users so that we can avoid the issue, but that is breaking the eco-system. How can the authors/publishers survive?
...Too complicated, may not be the right topic to focus on at this stage?
...Too complicated, may not be the right topic to focus on at this stage?
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