iPad, ePub, DRM

There's a lot of talking running around the web that Apple's iPad and specifically their iBooks application will not support Adobe's ADEPT / ADE encryption. Some even say therefore Apple is going with their own proprietary solution. To be honest, Sony's solution is also proprietary - although to be fair, it's:

• Already available across many devices.
  
• It's licensable - Apple's FairPlay won't be on competing devices, they don't want it to be.

This doesn't make the iPad a closed platform, locked to one vendor. iBooks is specifically installable as an application. Buy an iPad, open the box - there's no iBooks, it's not baked into the operating system. Since it runs iPhone applications out of the box, you can run txtr, Kobo, Kindle, B&N eReader and all the other wonderful apps from day one.

Whether the terms and conditions of the SDK for iPad will prohibit native (high resolution) versions of those apps remains to be seen, although I highly doubt it will be forbidden.