On May 30, 2010, at 5:16 PM, guy keren wrote:
so the real problem you have now, is your ability (or lack of) to
loan the book to friends or sell them as "used books". note that
since they are not "used" - you should be able to sell them in list-
price to anyone (perhaps a little less - because the buyer has to
work harder to buy the book from you, then to buy it from an online
reseller - until someone will build a "used e-books market" web
site). i don't see exactly how to overcome this, without 'ruining'
the industry (with the used-paper-books market, people had an
incentive to buy the new book from the publisher rather then the
used book, both due to convenience, and because the new book was in
a better condition). by the way, i won't be surprised if originally,
selling used books was considered illegal ;)
Not funny. Books existed for thousands of years, and copyrights only
have existed for around 130. Many places did not have copyrights, and
some still don't,
e.g. Saudi Arabia.
The difference between paper books and eBooks, is even with today's
technology, it's difficult and expensive to reproduce a book, while
you can place an ebook on one of the filesharing sites, e.g.
rapidshare, and thousands of people can download it in a day. Books
also have the added feature of being a physical thing, which follows
the established rules of ownership.
As for eBooks, while the next Harry Potter type fiction sensation will
be copyright probably into the next century, I don't care. I want an
ebook reader for the several gigabytes of electronics (specificaly
radio) books that are either out of copyright, or never were that I
have, and probably 100 times that if I ever get around to downloading
them.
As for DRM, IMHO the secret of iTunes was the DRM, which made the
music producers happy. At 99 cents each file, no one really cares if
they can't give it away or sell it, since the DRM was unobtrusive. You
could move it to and from your iPod, to a different iPod or computer,
with no trouble. And ITunes had a rescue system. If you lost your
entire collection, they could enable a complete download of everything
you bought from them.
At 40-80 NIS a read, I doubt that many people will buy books. People
in the US will pay those prices because that's the cost of a movie
ticket and they still go to the movies. Israeli's don't, the local
multiplex movie theater closed down and is now a clothing store. :-(
Geoff.
--
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendel...@gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found
in the Wikipedia.
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