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Originally Posted by riemann42
This is an interesting conversation, as the concept of ownership and copyright and eithics are hard to describe.
So, I'm going to think out loud for a second.
* When purchasing a physical or electronic book, you are not buying the content, as this is clearly owned by the original copyright holder.
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Nope. You are buying the content. The copyright holder controls the *rights to some uses* of that content. You have the rights to other uses of it--you may memorize it, critique it, compare real people to its protagonists, learn its facts & use them to further your career, write poetry inspired by it, cross your eyes to look at the stereogram pictures therein, uncross them to see them inverted, recite it to your children, or turn it upside down to better study the typography.
If it's physical, you may also use it as a doorstop, tear its pages for kindling or paper mache, or make a safe out of it. If it's electronic, you may search it to discover how many times it uses the letter "q," or change its title to "SUPERKILLERVIRUS.exe" and leave it on your desktop to scare your spouse.
The author's (or company's) monopoly on some usage rights doesn't mean they own the book you bought.
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So if all of the above are true, and you have agreed to it, then it seems like acquiring something you don't have rights to... namely an electronic copy of a book you own a physical copy of... is no more ethical than stealing a hard back book because "you bought the electronic version."
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Except that the right to format-shift has already been legally approved in several venues. The right to access in one setting includes the right to make it accessible (for yourself) in another setting--if you can watch the show on TV legally, you may tape it to watch it later; if you can listen to the song on the radio, you can record that too. You can even touchup your recordings--change the sound levels, remove the commercials.
By the same principle, if you can flip the pages physically, you can record them on a camera, and play them back very slowly on a PDF.
This doesn't give you the right to someone else's ebook, any more than having a TV gives you the right to a free set of VCR tapes of your favorite series. But you can hire someone to come to your house and tape your favorite shows without commercials; theoretically, you can just as legally hire someone to scan & convert your book for you.
The issue is whether you can hire someone who's *already* taped a show to give you that tape. And whether he can make multiple copies, or if he has to wait for another rerun of the episode to make another tape for someone else. Which starts to fail the common-sense test, regardless of what the law believes.