Tablets like the iPad are slightly different. If you are an early e-book adopter who wants to keep and reread the books you bought for your Kindle, you're locked into the Kindle platform. People who want to support their local independent bookstore might contemplate switching from the Kindle to the Kobo, but if they do they'll have to leave their (DRM-protected) Kindle books behind on their old device. The indies now sell both the devices and Kobo e-books. Late last year, independent booksellers made a deal with Kobo, an e-book retailer that also sells its own e-reader devices. Switching devices presents another headache for readers. Since the vast majority of all the dedicated e-readers out there are Kindles, that's a lot of customers. Many independent booksellers have online stores, but they can't sell new e-books to their Kindle-owning customers. The upshot: As long as publishers insist that their e-books be sold with DRM, Kindle owners can only buy those e-books from Amazon. DRM also prevents the purchaser from transferring his or her e-book to another proprietary device, such as moving it from her old Kindle to a brand-new Nook. It is possible to import some non-Kindle e-books into your Kindle device or app, but only if those e-books have no DRM. A Kindle will only support DRM-protected books that are in a format that Amazon owns and that only Amazon can sell. DRM is coding designed to prevent the people who buy an e-book from making copies of it. To put it simply: The Big Six publishers require that all their copyrighted e-books be sold with DRM (digital rights management) protection. The dispute and the situation that fostered it are confusing, and it can be difficult to suss out how either one affects readers.

The publishers are accused of entering into 'confidential agreements' with Amazon making this impossible. The booksellers - Fiction Addiction of Greenville, S.C., Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany, N.Y., and Posman Books of New York City - are demanding the right to sell what they term 'open-source and DRM-free' e-books, files that can be read on a Kindle or any other e-reading device. Finally, a trio of independent booksellers filed a class-action suit last week against the six largest book publishers and Amazon, accusing them of collaborating to create a monopoly on e-book sales and shutting small retailers out of the market. Then the Department of Justice sued five publishers and Apple for adopting a policy known as the agency model. First there were the authors (as represented by the Authors Guild), who sued Google Books for digitizing their work without permission. To the casual observer, the e-book revolution has produced two bumper crops: smutty trilogies Г la 'Fifty Shades of Grey' and lawsuits.

Can i put my kindle books in ibooks