Ah that explains it. You must be rich . The alternative (that you are a sufferer of Stockholm synfrome, and have internalized the values of your DRM captors) is just too scary to think about. –SURUR
I’m not rich until I have a manservant to carry 20 to 50 books with me where ever I go! Nor, despite common belief, have I “internalized” the of DRM captors. I’m just pragmatic about it.
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Movies and books are not the same thing. –SURUR
True, but ebooks and books are not the same thing either, not really.
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Personally I feel e-books should be significantly cheaper, ESPECIALLY if they are going to be more limited than a paperback.--JOLARD
But the complaints here are usually that not only do eBooks cost the same (or sometimes MORE) than the paper copy, they're "less good" because you can't read them how you want, you can't sell them, you can't loan them... Basically, you're paying more to be able to do less than you could with paperbacks”—KATI COMPTON
I don’t necessarily see an ebook as something more limited than a paperback. You get different advantages and disadvantages with ebooks. You’re not paying for less, you’re paying for different things. With ebooks, I can carry 20 to 50 or more without a manservant. The only limitations are battery life and/or the availability or rechargers. I consider this quite and advantage. Standing in line at the DMV, waiting for a table when you’re going out to eat, etc, or—the big granddaddy advantage—waiting while my wife shops! (Unless you’re had to wait while a wife/girlfriend does her shopping, you may not fully realize how happy this can make you and her. No hubby telling her to hurry up. Okay, to be fair this works for women too waiting for her guy to finish his guy stuff.) Yeah, you can do this with a paperback, but the ebook on the PDA makes this much easier and provides instant choices for what ever suits my fancy at the moment. So unless you have a manservant, ebooks win in this advantage. Another advantage is immediate availability. You don’t have to drive to the book store or wait for Amazon to ship it to you. Ebooks, also, don’t take up bookshelf space and you don’t have to box them up and pay an company to move then when you buy a new home. If the movers drive the truck into a lake, the publishers will not replace them; the insurance company will pay me off and then I can rebuy them.
I don’t see ebooks as “less good.” I see that as not the same thing as paper books. So you can’t loan it or sell. If you want to have those choices, buy paper.
There are many books that I want to keep for a long time. This I usually buy in Hardcover for my collection; quality paperbacks make up a secondary collection; mass markets take up space. Many books that I might have bought in mass market before, I now buy as an ebook.
As for whether you are paying too much for the rights you are getting, I think that is a matter of personal opinion, and can't answer for you. I think, for the most part, I’m getting enough value for what I pay for. If you want to have all the advantages of the ebook and all the advantages the paper book, shouldn’t that make it cost more?
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If publishers want a system where we rent books instead of buying them, then they should be $1 to $2 for a rental. That is reasonable. I am not going to rent a book for $16 though.—JOLARD
What is reasonable is what the market can support. Would I pay $16.00 to rent a book or ebook? Probably not. However, renting an unabridged Book On Tape is going to cost you. The 30 day rental for The Da Vinci Code is $18.95. Is that reasonable? Sure, if I was in the market to pay for a recorded book rental. Would that rental contract let me record my own copy as “fair use.” After all, maybe I’d want to listen to it again after my thirty days were done and the product returned.
Okay, that’s enough for now. I’m going out of town for the long weekend, so I better be off to buy a new ebook for the road trip. Have a good Holiday everyone.
When an ebook is purchased, perhaps it is a wrong paradigm to believe it is something to be kept perpetually.
This is not the paradigm in force for ordinary book purchases, why should ebooks be different? You are merely reinforcing the attitude that ebooks are inferior to physical ones. People aren't going to buy an inferior product.
We are already seeing the effects of the unstable nature of commerce. Those who bought Rocket ebooks will no longer be able to read them after mid-2006. Too bad for those who thought that the point of buying a book (as opposed to getting one from a library) was that it would sit on your bookshelf and be instantly available as long as you wanted it.
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If you were to rent a room for a weekend from a B&B, the innkeepers will give you a key, which you can use to enter and exit the room as much as you want for the duration of your stay. Do you think innkeepers would want you making an extra copy of the key so you could came back later?
And if you buy a house, will you be happy to find that the previous owner comes around a couple of years later and changes the lock? Buying is buying, renting is renting.
Yes, maybe the ebook market as a whole would be better suited to moving to a library model. Many of the formats have time-limited distribution model, and there are several library systems available. But publishers are going to have to accept that people aren't going to pay the same to rent a book as to buy it. The majority of ebooks sell for as much or more than their physical counterparts, that's not a rental price.
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When someone purchases a DRM LIT e-book, there are terms of use that apply, namely that you can only use it for devices with Activation for that specified purchaser. If you don’t agree to the terms of sale, don’t buy it.
Hey, just what the market needs, someone encouraging people not to buy ebooks! The ebook market is bad enough as it is.
Of course the publishing community is worried by the Napster phenomenon. But if they don't want to fall into the same trap they need to avoid making the same mistakes. The RIAA was slow on authorising legal music downloads and ended up with a culture in which music is seen as a free commodity. Publishers already have the Harry Potter phenomenon as a salutary lesson in the danger of following the same path. Whatever DRM system ends up being dominant, no-one can stop a person with a scanner and an OCR program.
Our new user certainly used some bad examples in his attempt at analogy. A movie? A symphony? A room at a B&B? These are all one-time experiences, and the customer knows this going in. No one expects to pay for one ticket of a movie which grants them unlimited access to repeatedly see that movie again. However, when we buy the DVD, now we do fully expect to be able to watch that movie any time we please.
Just because eBooks are an electronic medium does not mean we should expect limited usage of the product, no more than we expect our pBooks to disintegrate into dust after N readings. One has to look back no further than the Divx debacle a few years ago to see how the public feels about the idea of limited usage of a purchased product.
I have never used Convert LIT, primarily because once I discovered eBooks, it took no more than a few days to discern that MS Reader is an inferior product, and their DRM is the root of all evil (WalMart runs a close second, but that's another story! :lol: ) But I do feel that Convert LIT is a good idea, for exactly the reasons everyone uses it: it allows them to use the product they paid for hassle-free. It also is a demonstration to MS that their DRM is fairly simple to bypass. They can continue the cat-and-mouse game, which I'm certain they will for a time, or they can eventually redesign their DRM system, at which point Convert LIT will become irrelevant. Given the small, niche market that eBooks currently occupy, I highly doubt that there is a booming pirate market that MS, etc. need to have any immediate fear of.
The main problems are: marketing, devices, and the consumer awareness and willingness to try eBooks. Only the tech-savvy, future-thinking, or just plain geeks among us have embraced the technology thus far, for the most part. The vast majority of consumers probably don't even know eBooks exist. If they did, look how many people still have trouble with even the basics of computers. No instruction manuals are needed for pBooks.
I do not buy books that I do not wish to be able to keep forever and read over and over. If I just want to read something once, I go to the library and get it for free. So, I'm not going to buy ebooks from microsoft. I'll get them for Palm Reader. If I ever see another free ebook that I want, then I'll convert it. It's free, no one is losing money, as far as I'm concerned I'm not doing anything wrong. And if you disagree, I don't care. Why are we still arguing about this?
ctmagnus: love your avatar... from there's something about mary?
and the reason and cause for this whole thread, was some-one seemingly intelligent enough to use a pocketpc and write paragraphs of text, holding a view so diametrically apposed the community here and general, what I would call, natural freedom.
Re: Don’t Lament for Convert LIT
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