Book: A Futurist's Manifesto

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A Reader's Bill of Rights (Kassia Krozser)

Kassia Krozser, publisher of Booksquare.com, covers the intersection of technology and publishing. Kassia has worked in web and digital publishing for over ten years, focusing primarily on content development and management. As co-owner of Oxford Media Works, she consults with clients and develops digital publishing initiatives. You can find Kassia on Twitter at: @booksquare.

Every revolution has to start somewhere, and the digital books revolution started with readers. Oh sure, Amazon and Sony helped with their reading devices, but it was the people who created and sustained a demand for ebooks even as publishers considered them too small a market to worry about.

And it is the reader who is bearing the brunt of the rapid, sometimes erratic, sometimes brilliant transition of traditional publishers into publishers of the future. We—the readers—have experienced windowing schemes, formatting disasters, and, of course, Digital Rights Management (DRM) machinations that restrict our access to the books we’ve purchased.

To this day, I still cannot extract certain books I purchased directly from a publisher from the stranglehold of Adobe Digital Editions. In fact, every time I open ADE, it becomes an exercise in absurdity. My rule? If you, the publisher, make me use ADE, then I, the reader, will take my business elsewhere.

Yet I stick with digital books because they give me the best reading option for my lifestyle. I find I will suffer ...