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It's really amazing how short-sighted some people can be. She's allowing all the HP movies to be released on DVD, which is the same thing as e-harry/video and people can copy and share those, so I don't know why she is so averse to e-harry/text.
My wife is an aspiring author and is a member of a lot of yahoogroups which cater to authors and is also a member of a national association of authors in the genre she prefers and she is constantly sharing with me the discussions and paranoia these authors have concerning e-publication. Anyone would think, from these extremely paranoid discussions that:
A) authors are extremely heavier piraters of computer programs and data and so they suspect that everyone else will pirate their books, so they'll sell one copy and the whole world will be reading pirated copies of that single sale;
B) each author thinks that they have written the next novel that everybody everywhere in every language will want to read, and so they can dictate the publication terms and feel they can force more sales if their books are released in difficult-to-copy form;
C) The rest of us in this world are all stinking pirates who never buy legitimate copies of anything which is available in electronic form, and so they'll never sell more than one or two copies which will then be up on every warez site and freely distributed in the files sections of every yahoogroup no matter what its focus is.
The reality is that most of us are willing to pay the paperback price for an e-book and some of us are willing to pay the hardback price for a new release (I never buy new-release hardback books, so I don't expect I'll be willing to pay that price for an e-book -- I'll just have to wait for the price to drop to paperback prices just as I do in dead-tree bookstores), so all that paranoia is just so much tempest-in-a-teapot.
If they'd just try it, they might find a nice increase in their sales when people who have bought paper copies are willing to pay again for a more convenient e-book of the same title. I know that I've bought three diffferent copies of one book, having to buy a new copy when I have changed e-book formats (originally Palm Reader, then MobiPocket, and finally Sony Reader format) -- I better get it read quickly before I discover a new format! ;-)
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