Generally I’m pretty wary of MS bashing, and tend to roll my eyes when online posts rebelliously describe the company as M$ or /\/\icr0$0ft, of whatever. That is not to say that I think they are great however, and here is one issue which regularly causes me to curse their name:

MS *.lit format (for ebooks) is proprietary, meaning that no one can write software to read the format unless MS says so. This is in spite of the fact that it appears to be based on a specification developed by the Open eBook Forum , an XML based standard being developed for the benefit of all. The only good reason for *.lit even existing seems to be to support the dreaded DRM [Digital Rights Management]. Unfortunately MS reader is the only well known reader that seems to support an OEB based format, so when nice people like The University of Virginia make ebooks available for free online, they have little choice but to select the *.lit as one of their 2 downloadable formats (Palm *.pdb is the other one). That is to say: the information they are attempting to give away for free in the most useful format, can only be read by an MS product, because MS appear to have no interest in supporting any form of content distribution over which they do not exercise control. This means that an enterprising young go-getter like myself can NOT make a reader which will read these files, even though I would very much like to [and I'm sure that the providers of such free information would also like to know that individuals such as myself have the opportunity to contribute to their efforts to disseminate free literature] It would have required virtually no additional effort to allow an unencrypted OEB based format (say, *.oeb, comprising at least a subset of the full specification) to be read by MS reader, and also virtually no effort to provide this alternative to all tools which currently generate *.lit files. That the Open eBook Forum does not appear to be promoting the adoption of any such open format marks them as a bunch of oxymorons.