...(paper-books - your grandfather will probably be able to explain what books on paper are like)...
i'm old enough to still know what those are, dude!
Ah, you are an antique dealer or museum director?
Joke aside - in five-six years time, readers with e-ink will probably start becoming affordable and we will be busy transferring our ebooks to these (one more argument for DRM-free books!): How many years will it then take before paperback books disappear? Textbooks and many reference books will stay on for at least a while as even I need books on paper for studying (but you will probably get such text of the book on CD).
i'm a big fan of ebooks. i don't care for the "smell and feel" of real books. what good are they when they're not around when i need them? home library, nice thing, but what if you're on vacation in, for example, russia and you finished the books you brought along. go out and buy some more? or rather, go online with your pda/smartphone and get a fresh supply.
sitting in the car while waiting for your girlfriend to come down, oops no paper book along cuz you never planned on waiting. cellphone/pda ... always with you.
anyway, i don't see where this discussion is going, so i'll tune out and maybe someone can get back on topic
(i realize i seem to have a tendency to drag things OT. must ... work ... on ... URGH ... that !)
Well if you want to be sure, you can always buy the books on paper and scan them in to create your own ebooks. That way there's no DRM and you know you'll always have them and if the format changes then you can just re-scan Legal too!
uh ... that's a lot of work
oh, and no need to re-scan, just save the original as RTF and then convert to whatever reader you need.
and to be completely legal you are not allowed to scan the whole thing. need to leave out first and last page, then you're ok.
(that's what i picked up in my "copyright" class)
and to be completely legal you are not allowed to scan the whole thing. need to leave out first and last page, then you're ok.
(that's what i picked up in my "copyright" class)
i don't know the reason exactly. but you are allowed to make copies of the work. and since there's no real definition as to how much is an excerp and how much is too much, they say you're allowed to make copies of parts of a book, but not the entire book.
the part with "leave out the first and last pages" was actually said by our perfesser, i didn't find that in a law book. i guess it might be considered a loop-hole.
i'm a big fan of ebooks. i don't care for the "smell and feel" of real books. what good are they when they're not around when i need them? home library, nice thing, but what if you're on vacation in, for example, russia and you finished the books you brought along. go out and buy some more? or rather, go online with your pda/smartphone and get a fresh supply.
sitting in the car while waiting for your girlfriend to come down, oops no paper book along cuz you never planned on waiting. cellphone/pda ... always with you.
anyway, i don't see where this discussion is going, so i'll tune out and maybe someone can get back on topic
Since the subject initiate on digital formats, I do see you stayed on topic, actually you just touched the issue on why the different eBook formats keeps me for being an avid eBook reader.
There is an obvious practical benefit for carrying several books on your pocket, storaged on your PPC. However, I still prefer the paper version.
And that is because of different formats and DRM.
I do not feel comfortable trying to develop a "Personal Format Strategy" when deciding where to look and buy a book.
I do go back to the books I read quite often; I enjoy giving them away, lending them, trading them. And I would like to keep doing that for the years to come, regardless of the PDA I am using, the OS it uses, the DRM policy in place, and if the store I got my books from is still in business and support the format.
I have a large paper book collection (built up prior to getting my PDA), but since I got my Clie, then Ipaq, I haven't purchased a single paper book. That's about 2 years now...
I'm a regular book re-reader, and read many of my favourites multiple times (usually every couple of years). I'm investing all my book purchasing money in ebooks now, so I want to be able to continue reading them in years to come, whatever the current hardware and software is... current DRM gets in the way of this, unfortunately. The ebook publishing industry needs to address this, I feel, if they really want ebooks to succeed any time soon.
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