The ebook scene is a different animal then the music scene. Name an album and I can almost guarantee that you we'll be able to find an illicit copy of it somewhere. Conversely name a book. Let's say a current book on the Globe and Mail best seller list. Now, I can almost guarantee you that you'll be hard pressed to find an illicit copy of that book somewhere. The genie is out of the bottle on the MP3 scene but content providers aren't letting the same thing happen with the EPUB scene. Why? DRM mostly but I'm also guessing other facts play a part: market fragmentation, pirates don't read, lack of a clear winner in the ebook file format wars... but I digress.
It's no secret that I am a Kobo Fanboy. I've blogged about it a few times 
I was alerted to something odd the other day. I had a patron who was trying to view a PDF file in an Ebsco database and was having trouble with it. As it turns out the problem was that inexplicably the file was being forced open through an embedded Adobe Acrobat viewer plugin. Yup Adobe or nothing else, what was also 'paint you in a corner' about the situation was that no HTML version of the document was available. Yuck, and here is why:
