On the Interoperability of eBook Formats

It is widely seen as a serious problem that European as well as international customers who have bought an ebook from one of the international ebook retailers implicitly subscribe to this retailer as their sole future ebook supplier, i.e. in effect, they forego buying future ebooks from any other supplier.
In particular, this is a threat to the tight and qualified European book distribution infrastructure and hence to the European book culture, since subscribers to one of these ebook ecosystems cannot buy future ebooks from
privately owned community-located brick & mortar booksellers engaging in ebook retailing. This view is completely in line with the European Commission: the Digital Agenda of the European Commission calls in
pillar II (interoperability and standards) for an “effective interoperability between IT products and services to build a truly digital society. Europe must ensure that new IT devices, applications, data repositories and services interact seamlessly anywhere – just like the Internet.”
It is the task of this report to study whether convincing technological or functional reasons on the side of the international ebook retailers can be identified to justify non-interoperable ebook formats. Moreover, we study the digital rights management (DRM) measures employed by those retailers and question the necessity to build up additional walls between the ecosystems with the help of such measures. In the process, we will also address the challenge to protect intellectual property adequately across ebook ecosystems.
And we evaluate the potential of the proposal for a common ebook format standard covering multimedia and interactivity features, EPUB 3 (as proposed by the IDPF in October 2011), and also dwell on interoperable options regarding the DRM protection of intellectual property.