MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Tricky Question of the Day: I want a book... where should I buy it?

Münchener · 09-13-2007, 10:45 AM

I think that this digital trend will force a dramatic change in the way business is conducted and the concept of property rights of "things". I believe that the most important thing being bought in a book is not the paper and the ink, but the content. If the technology used now allows selling the content unattached to the phisical media, its time to do a fair cost reduction. I'd accept buying the content of a book for, say, 2 dollars, and being granted a couple of months to read it. After that period has passed, I loose the access to that content, and if I want to read it again, I re-rent it. We are now living in an access age, not a owning age. I bet many of you would accept that kind of reading. But the problems seems to be greed. Publishers do not let us really keep the e-books for the same lenght of time we could have kept the paper ones, but at the same time they charges us like they were giving us the dead-tree edition. That's greed to me. I don't have a problem in paying 1 dollar for a newspaper I will read and throw away, the same way I don't mind to pay a couple of dollars to read a book, even if I don't get to keep it. Now, 20 dollars for a DRMed bag of bytes that nobody can assure me will work in 10 years...

09-13-2007, 10:45 AM	#32
Münchener Searching for e-Gutemberg Posts: 4 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Argentina Device: PRS500	I think that this digital trend will force a dramatic change in the way business is conducted and the concept of property rights of "things". I believe that the most important thing being bought in a book is not the paper and the ink, but the content. If the technology used now allows selling the content unattached to the phisical media, its time to do a fair cost reduction. I'd accept buying the content of a book for, say, 2 dollars, and being granted a couple of months to read it. After that period has passed, I loose the access to that content, and if I want to read it again, I re-rent it. We are now living in an access age, not a owning age. I bet many of you would accept that kind of reading. But the problems seems to be greed. Publishers do not let us really keep the e-books for the same lenght of time we could have kept the paper ones, but at the same time they charges us like they were giving us the dead-tree edition. That's greed to me. I don't have a problem in paying 1 dollar for a newspaper I will read and throw away, the same way I don't mind to pay a couple of dollars to read a book, even if I don't get to keep it. Now, 20 dollars for a DRMed bag of bytes that nobody can assure me will work in 10 years...