Thanks to Michael at Tame the Web for this interesting article:
The 10 worst consumer tech trends
by Erin Bell, PC World Canada
10. Closed source technology
9. Over-promising and under-delivering
8. Fanboys
7. Region encoding
6. Licensing Fees
5. Format wars
4. Proprietary File Formats
3. Annoying web ads
2. High cost of wireless data plans
1. DRM
It cannot be argued that public libraries are not affected by consumer trends and many of their suppliers are captive to some consumer market evolving technologies and business models that are beyond their control.
I would have added a few that are more annoying for libraries:
1. Competing eBook formats and incompatible readers – lack of a global standard
2. The lack of a cross-format streaming media / video player
3. MP3 files for music or audiobooks that cannot be played on iPods or MP3 players or vice versa
4. Content embargoes, nuff said.
5. Pay walls on newspaper websites.
I am sure there are more but these are the top 5 I hear the most about.
Stephen
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Stephen,
I might have a solution to problem number 3. First of all, please keep in mind that there is not much that we, as consumers, can do to change publishers/ manufacturers mindset. That’s why there is an issue about different file format and incompatibility.
Consumers do have a choice nowaday. We can now download a program to solve files incompatibility problem.
Good Audio Books usually published by large publishers are almost always come as WMA file with DRM.
You can easily convert these WMA file into universally accepted MP3 file with ease. You need a good converting program to do that.
Please Checkout:
http://www.RightAudioBooks.com/NoteBurner.html
You could also add lack of a standard for music instead of incompatible mp3. If everything was mp3 and could read mp3, it would be tougher to have drm. Format wars are often driven by drm.