Readium

Readium

Basic information
Founded	2013-01-29
Legal Structure	Non-profit
Industry	Software
Also known as	Readium Foundation
Official website	https://readium.org/

Readium Foundation is a non profit that produces "reading system toolkits" that can be deployed across multiple platforms and digital publishing formats. According to its certificate of incorporation, it was incorporated in Delaware, USA in 2013. It has multiple members including: The European Digital Reading Lab (EDRLab), Bibliovault (University of Chicago Press), Columbia University Library, eKitabu, New York Public Library, New York University Library and DRM Inside Co., Ltd.

Background

"The Readium project was started by the IDPF in 2012 because the EPUB 3.0 specification had been released late in 2011, but no implementation yet existed (or, at least, had been publicly released). So IDPF provided some funding and encouragement and two firms, Evident Point and Bluefire, took the lead in developing a JavaScript implementation of a significant part of the EPUB 3 spec."

The JavaScript implementation lacked features and was written as a Google Chrome extension. It also didn't provide native implementations for devices and "it couldn’t support DRM securely." After additional development, they released the open source Readium SDK Core.

"The SDK was designed from the beginning to support DRM ( Digital Rights Management ), a mandatory feature for digital library lending, and also required by many publisher for anti-piracy matters. It was moreover designed to be DRM-agnostic, able to support multiple DRM implementations. However, while that capability existed in the SDK, there was also an increasing perception over time that the existing DRM implementations (Adobe, Kobo, Sony) were too heavyweight and proprietary and there existed a need for a new open-source DRM specification and implementation. The result was the Readium LCP (Licensed Content Protection) specification and implementation, which is rolling out in 2017."

Consumer-impact summary

While it is commendable that Readium and its partners (like EDRLab) promote open source code and wished to design a DRM system that aimed to avoid vendor lock-in (which could have caused a lack of innovation, diversity, features and would have handed one vendor total control), aimed to be more interoperable, simpler, secure and ensuring that:

"The solution is designed to be minimally intrusive for end-users, who don’t need to create a third-party account. User can share their ebooks with their family or close friends"

it can be argued that DRM in itself is negatively affecting consumers.

Moreover, the Readium SDK was reportedly developed so that it would support multiple DRM technologies, allowing other DRM vendors to easily integrate their systems with Readium. This in effect lowers the barrier to entry, because companies with existing DRM implementations can more easily migrate to Readium and keep using their DRM. The variety also allows for companies that would otherwise be hesitant to pick and choose and implement DRM in a way that might be cheaper or more for them.

In addition to this, Readium has filed DMCA takedown requests to force tools which circumvented Readium LCP to remove code from their repositories. As a result, it is currently not possible for users to archive their own ebooks without Readium LCP DRM in an easy way (or perhaps any way). And as it turns out, there are several examples of users complaining or asking for help with this exact issue.

Incidents

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Readium category.

Example incident one (date)

Main article: link to the main CR Wiki article

Short summary of the incident (could be the same as the summary preceding the article).

Example incident two (date)

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Products

• Readium LCP
• Readium Mobile
• Readium Desktop
• Readium Web
• Readium Web Publication Manifest

External Links

• Readium LCP Introduction Video (archived)
• Readium LCP v1.0 Specification (archived)
• Readium's DMCA Request (archived)
• Conceptual Basis for Readium LCP
• Readium Architecture

See also

• Digital rights management
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Adobe Digital Editions' ebook DRM