What you should know before buying ebooks from Barnes and Noble

While most of the ebooks I have been reading on the Nook tablet are open source classics, I recently purchased one from the Barnes & Noble store. Then I discovered something very disappointing.

Although Barnes & Noble books are in the open ePub format, B&N locks them down with "Digital Rights Management," which means the book you purchased, in an open source format, cannot be read on anything other than a Barnes & Noble device.

Now that's a brilliant business decision: Incentive your customers to get their books from other sources. I could have purchased the same book for the same price from Google ebooks, readable on multiple platforms.

This combined with B&N's decision to lock down the Android operating system to prohibit loading of Android apps not approved by and sold through B&N are astoundingly shortsighted.

If you own Barnes & Noble stock, sell it. What once looked like B&N's salvation will be their doom, I'm sorry to say.