by Micah | Jan 20, 2012 | Adobe Publishing Platform, Micah
This is part 5 of a 10 part series by Micah Bowers, Co-Founder and CEO of Bluefire. Click here to read the first post in the series.
Adobe Vendor ID is a new solution from Adobe that is the most important new addition to the Adobe eBook platform since RMSDK. It enables eBook retailers to deploy branded ereading client applications that don’t require customers to have an Adobe ID in order to download ACS4 protected content.
With Vendor ID, customers can use the same username and password they use to log in to their account at the retailer’s website to authorize their client applications and devices. This greatly simplifies the user experience for consumers and also enables retailers to offer a single sign-in in for shopping, account access, and downloading—all working seamlessly with the Adobe eBook platform. The Adobe Vendor ID service is available to retailers through resellers such as Bluefire.
Have you ever used Adobe Digital Editions or a mobile app such as Bluefire Reader and been asked to authorize your device with your Adobe ID? This identity based DRM approach is useful because it enables interoperability of content acquired from a range of sources, across a range of commercial apps and devices. It also enables consumers to use neutral apps such as Adobe Digital Editions on the desktop, or Bluefire Reader on mobile devices, that are not affiliated with any particular retailer and thus do not include end user accounts. These free apps provide a useful “Swiss army knife” function for ad-hoc documents and for reading content acquired from retailers and libraries that don’t offer their own ereader apps.
However, the requirement to have an Adobe ID to read an eBook purchased from a retailer or checked out from a library can also be a point of friction for the consumer. Before the consumer can download and read books they purchase or borrow, he or she must first visit the Adobe website and sign up for a free Adobe ID account. Consumers see this as an additional hoop to jump through, and this extra step can cause all kinds of confusion, including questions like “Who do I contact for support?”, “What is an Adobe ID?”, and “Why do I have to have an Adobe ID to buy or borrow eBooks from you?”
This friction has been one of the biggest challenges in the Adobe eBook ecosystem to-date for everyone involved. Vendor ID solves that. And, the great thing about Vendor ID is that it does not forgo the consumer benefits of interoperability. Retailers who deploy applications that leverage Vendor ID can enable their customers to import and re-download content that they previously acquired with an Adobe ID,or another Vendor ID, and then read that content in the retailer’s branded application. This removes one of the big barriers to acquiring new customers who have prior eBook purchases. And it offers a key point of differentiation from the closed, “private” ecosystems of the market leaders that trap their customers in their walled garden.
Retailers can now sell and deliver eBooks to the hundreds of millions of consumers with smart phones and tablets. They can provide the ease of use and convenience that consumers expect while providing consumers with greater freedom of choice. This is the kind of technology that can really change the game.
– Micah
by Micah | Jan 18, 2012 | Adobe Publishing Platform, Micah
This is part 4 of a 10 part series by Micah Bowers, Co-Founder and CEO of Bluefire. Click here to read the first post in the series.
The software reseller business model is a model in which the developer of a technology product (such as Adobe) authorizes other companies to sell licenses to their products. The reseller has the ability to offer services and support that are related to those products. In the case of enterprise products, these authorized resellers are often focused on a particular, sometimes very narrow market vertical. Sometimes resellers are also “systems integrators” – offering integration services for the software they license.
This reseller model has a long history at Adobe, both in the packaged software sold via retail channels, and – more to the point here – in enterprise software. For example, the Adobe PDF Library is a Software Development Kit (SDK) that has been licensed via the reseller channel for many years. Licensees use the SDK to incorporate PDF functionality into their systems, often with the help of an Systems Integrator who has special expertise in PDF related software development. A similar model is employed by Adobe in a variety of verticals, such as education and government.
In the case of the Adobe eBook Platform, resellers provide important services such as consulting, support and systems integration that help retailers and publishers entering the rapidly evolving ebook marketplace make good strategic and technical decisions, while lowering overall costs and time to market.
Adobe announced the transition of their eBook Platform technologies to this reseller model on February 14th, 2011. They are working with a growing group of highly capable resellers with deep expertise in the digital publishing industry, including Bluefire. Products now sold through the reseller channel include RMSDK, ACS4, and Adobe Vendor ID. This switch to a reseller model takes time. It’s nearly a year after the announcement and the transition is still underway. Resellers are being added in new markets as demand warrants. The switch to a reseller model is indicative of a platform that is reaching maturity.
One downside of this transition is that it has at times caused some people in the ebook world to wonder whether Adobe is somehow “abandoning” the platform, as Adobe has transitioned their sales efforts to other areas and inquiries to Adobe about the products are referred to the reseller channel. That is certainly not the case. It is incumbent upon the reseller channel companies to promote the products they license, provide product information and deploy sales and support teams. We and others have been doing just that. The ebook marketplace is expanding so incredibly rapidly, with so many companies entering the market recently, that the bulk of our focus and energies have been spent on these new customers. We all have to get out and evangelize the platform to a larger audience.
Bluefire is aggressively pursuing our current business strategy because we believe that Adobe is actively supporting their eBook ecosystem. Supporting our belief is the fact that Adobe has continued to make significant enhancements to the platform throughout this transition. I described these enhancements in the previous post in this series. Adobe provides excellent support to the reseller channel and we talk directly to the developers and product management team at Adobe on a weekly basis. Based on this demonstrated history of support, it is my expectation that Adobe will continue to innovate in the digital publishing arena with solutions for magazines, newspapers and books. To learn more on what’s going on at Adobe visit http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-publishing.html.
In my next post in this series I will look a bit deeper at Adobe Vendor ID which enables developers to create RMSDK based desktop and mobile apps that don’t require the use of an Adobe ID.
– Micah
by Cliff | Jan 18, 2012 | The Bluefire Team
(This is the first post in a series of introductions to the Bluefire team.)
Jason Sacks, Bluefire Project Manager
Hi, I’m Jason Sacks and I’m the Project Manager at Bluefire Productions. I manage the processes and workflows around our white-label eReader products. I have about twelve years experience in the computer industry, most recently as the Release Manager for the Windows Protocols team at Microsoft. I joined Bluefire in the summer of 2011 and am really delighted to be part of a company that is making a real impact eReading.
I have a particular passion for eReader technology because I’m a voracious reader. My favorite books are nonfiction works about history and economics. These types of books help provide a deep perspective on our complex world. I really believe that the only way to understand the future is to understand the past, so I find history to be endlessly fascinating.
My other great reading passion is in graphic novels. I’ve read comic books since I was a kid, and as an adult I have grown a deeper passion for this art form. The graphic novel is a medium for really interesting work these days. It’s an infinitely malleable medium that offers amazing and unique storytelling opportunities that one can’t find in any other format.
Yeah, you can see I have a passion for this stuff, which is why I also own and manage a comic and pop culture website, Comics Bulletin. I work with a team of about 40 writers and editors and we cover all kinds of aspects of pop culture and “geek culture”, including TV, movies and video games. I think it’s a pretty great site and we run a lot of outstanding writing. It’s pretty much all run by volunteers, but we produce a lot of content every day for the site. Thankfully I have a great team that keeps me from having to spend all my nights and weekends working on site business.
Obviously with this background in technology and love for comics, you can see why I have a deep passion for eReading technology. As a company, we need to find ways to help companies improve and streamline the experience of reading ebooks and comics on iPad and Android devices. More than that, though, we need to work to make the device invisible for the user.
Just as you seldom think about the actual three-dimensional book that you’re reading, you should also seldom think about the actual tablet or phone that you’re reading on. The real trick when working on these apps is to allow the reader to feel engrossed in their book, to create apps that help readers to connect to the material they love without feeling the electronics sitting in their way.
A small, nimble and extremely entrepreneurial company like Bluefire is the perfect place to be tacking these complex issues in smart ways. Because we can think on our feet and innovate quickly, Bluefire is in the perfect position to have a dialogue with our users and clients about the best ways to make the right choices in eReader technology. I’m loving this journey so far, and can’t wait to see how this business evolves.
– Jason
by Micah | Jan 17, 2012 | Adobe Publishing Platform, Micah
This is part 3 of a 10 part series by Micah Bowers, Co-Founder and CEO of Bluefire. Click here to read the first post in the series.
In my previous post in this series I provided a concise overview of the Adobe eBook publishing platform. Many of you are probably already familiar with the basic elements of the Adobe ecosystem, but may not know about the following recent and exciting developments.
Adobe has released significant updates to RMSDK (versions 9.2 and 9.3) in the last year. Along with the usual fixes and minor tweaks, Adobe delivered a brand new EPUB rendering engine. While there are too many enhancements delivered as part of the new rendering engine to do it justice to in one short blog post, the most significant set of new features is related to foreign language support, notably Asian languages. There are also big improvements in typography and text rendering, including support for hyphenation and, importantly, support for text-to-speech (TTS) for content accessibility.
Adobe has also released Content Server 4.1.2 which enables what I call “pass-hash” protection for PDF and EPUB files. This pass-hash system is a new option beyond the “identity based” system that was already supported with the use of an Adobe ID account to authorize a limited number of devices. This pass-hash system embeds an encrypted (or “hashed”) version of a user name and/or password into the ebook file. Any user who receives a copy of the file and knows the username and password associated with the item can read the eBook. Adobe calls this a form of “Social DRM” because the eBook and password info can be shared with others and is not limited to a specific number of authorized devices. (Note that the release of this system does not imply a change to the concurrent device limit used in the more popular identity based DRM option.) Content Server 4.1.2 also added support for TTS as part of the available content protection permission set. More information on these topics can be found on the Adobe Digital Publishing Blog.
Adobe has also released a new generation of the Adobe Digital Editions desktop app, currently available as a Beta release in Adobe Labs. It has a very different look-and-feel than the first generation app, but the most important new feature is its integrated accessibility support. You can learn more about the latest release – “Adobe Digital Editions 1.8 Preview” which was released in November 2011. Download the preview and check it out for yourself! It is still a work in progress but this Beta is a good step forward.
That said, even as ADE improves I think many organizations will choose to release their own RMSDK based desktop applications. The reason for this is that desktop operating systems simply don’t enable a great way to “push” ebook file downloads from a retailer or library website into an application. So in order to offer a good consumer experience, the content acquisition interfaces need to be integrated within the applications themselves.
I believe this is a key reason why Adobe has focused so much of their development efforts toward providing enabling technologies to 3rd party developers – so that the 3rd parties can in turn build ereading apps and devices that tightly integrate discovery, download, and reading features.
The down-side of this focus on providing enabling technology is that it is sometimes “invisible” to a broader audience of folks in the digital publishing space – until companies like Bluefire build things with it.
A great example of this is another new capability of the platform: Adobe Vendor ID. This allows developers to create mobile and desktop applications that do not require that the end user have an Adobe ID. The user can simply “sign-in” to the ereading application with the user account they are issued by a retailer, library, employer, etc. This capability was first introduced in November of 2010, but companies have only begun to release their own products that take advantage of this capability in the last few months.
Another major change took place in 2011 as well: the transition of the eBook Platform to the “reseller” model. I’ll dive deeper in to that and Vendor ID in the next two posts.
– Micah
by Cliff | Jan 13, 2012 | Events
Going to Digital Book World? Come see us. We’re exhibiting and would love to meet with you! Contact us to setup a meeting or just drop by.
Digital Book World 2012 runs from January 23rd to 25th at the New York Sheraton.
– Cliff
