With e-readers becoming a real market, battle lines are drawn over DRM

The e-reader market is hot, and everyone loves the competition. Thanks to the heightened activity in the sector, market research group NPD's DisplaySearch this morning forecasts an astonishing growth in e-paper displays.

This year, 22 million units were shipped, resulting in $431 million in revenue. E-paper displays aren't limited to the Kindle/Reader set either, they're being used in cell phones, watches and clocks, advertisements, and more. Because of this, NPD forecasts a 64% compound annual growth rate in unit sales and a 41% growth rate in revenues. By that formula, the market will be worth $9.6 billion by 2018, with 1.8 billion e-paper displays shipped out for use.

Consumer awareness of e-paper has increased dramatically over the course of 2009, and the market is about to hit a competitive high note with a flock of new products from different manufacturers that support different content stores and wireless providers...and in turn, different rights management technologies.

Yesterday, Sony unveiled its first wireless e-reader, finally putting Sony's products on par with Amazon's popular Kindle, and offering wireless 3G through AT&T.

Barnes & Noble opened its own e-bookstore in July and now has a couple of hardware companies lined up to support it. In addition to Plastic Logic, which aligned with B&N earlier this year, iREX technologies announced on Monday that its newest 8.1-inch resistive touchscreen e-reader will include 3G content acquisition through B&N's eBookstore.

Today, iRex announced that it will also roll out support for EPUB and PDF in the fourth quarter on all of its reader products. Interestingly, the inclusion of Adobe's PDF will give iRex users the option to choose which DRM-inclusive format they support.

On iRex's blog today, the company's community manager wrote: "Unfortunately the relationship of Adobe and Mobipocket DRM's is an exclusive one, and both can not be supported on one device at the same time. In order to ensure that our customers are not limited in any way from obtaining the content they desire to view on their eReader. Therefore we have decided to keep the old firmware with Mobipocket DRM available. This means that you as a customer can decide if you like to run Mobipocket or Adobe DRM on your device."

Earlier this summer, Sony dropped its proprietary DRM in support of the "more open" Adobe CS4 copy protection. Amazon, however, remains committed to its AZW format, which cannot be shared among other e-readers.

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