[Randeep]

I love books. Physical books! When I go to someone's house for a party or dinner I'll instantly gravitate towards the bookshelf to see what they have in their collection. Sometimes I'll see a book I have read in the past and conversation soon follows. Othertimes I will see a book I've been wanting to read and I'll get to borrow it from them and maybe even return the favor by lending one of my own. Or I'll discover a whole new world of books I never knew I wanted to read.

And I love eBooks. The lightness and the convenience is remarkable. I can read while eating, read while walking, save a lot of weight while traveling, and so forth.

I resent the fact, then, that if I want to buy an "analog" book, I would have to also purchase the digital copy separately. Many publishers are charging almost as much (or more!) money for the eBooks as their paper counterparts despite the high cost of inventory management, shipping and forestry associated with physical copies. If I buy a CD, however, I am within my rights to digitize my music on my computer, store it on an MP3 player, etc.

So I don't feel like I should be obligated to buy a separate eBook after having purchased the real deal. I could take Stephen Hawking's Grand Design and scan it in page by page, but what a giant pain that would be. How about trying to digitize Martin's Song of Ice and Fire to stick on an eReader? Forget about it! And yet this would be legal as long as I didn't distribute it to the masses.

I think there could be some alternatives that bookstores might be comfortable with, like selling both as a package deal, an RFID chip in the spine of a regular book to give access to the digital one, etc. Of course as long as people continue to buy copies of both formats this will probably never happen.

I could also download illegal copies of eBooks after purchasing the physical ones, but piracy isn't my thing (even though I don't think this would qualify as piracy from an ethics POV) and I'm not really into it.

Am I alone on this? What are your thoughts?