A final rant before I go back to Lurker mode....

[Barcey]

I just wanted to thank everyone for their assistance. This site has been invaluable and has great resources. Also very interesting debates which keep sucking me in. Great job but I've been spending too much time here and need to focus on other things. One final rant though so proceed with caution. (Actually my advise is to ignore it).

Electronic Reader Price

I keep seeing comments in the press that electronic readers are too expensive. The argument seems to be that they have to pay for themselves or nobody will buy them. I'll never understand that, I don't expect my phone, iPod or TV to pay for themselves why does my reader have to? When I look at the personal library I've been able to accumulate from this site and from PG and compare it to what it would have cost to create an equivalent paper library 50 years ago, well I made out like a bandit. The price will drop and the devices will get better, if you don't like the price all I can say is you'll have to wait a little longer. You can't expect the vendors to sell it to you without profit.

Publishers / Authors

Embrace the technology it's a good thing. I've convinced myself that the E-Ink technology is good enough to replace paper books for me and I don't see myself ever buying another paper book (for pleasure reading). With baby boomers entering retirement they'll have more time for reading and with aging eyes (speaking from experience) the font flexibility is a godsend.

IMNSHO your fear is misplaced. Rather then building defense to protect your assets you should be worried about how you're going to compete for your customers most precious possession, their ever diminishing leisure time.
My work keeps intruding. I've had to cancel magazine subscriptions that I love because they were piling up unread, I canceled my local newspaper. My HDTV PVR is full. I have hours of unwatched DVD's. I'm going to try quitting cold turkey reading Mobileread for a while. Now I have 130 ebooks on my Cybook just waiting to be read. You should be worried about how you're going to get to the top of my reading queue and not putting up barriers to me buying your product.

Think outside the box. Instead of trying to bleed every penny from your customers you have to think of new ideas. For example when I buy a book consider giving it to me in both electronic and audio formats. I would love to be able to press a button and send my place in my Cybook to the GPS in my car with Audible and continue to listen to the book while I drive. Same thing with my iPod when I walk the dog.

Send me emails on my phone with excerpts from books that you think I'll enjoy based on my previous purchases. Let me buy the book direct from my phone and pay through my cell phone bill.

eBabel

The feudal business models just has me baffled. I guess history really is the study of past mistakes... so you can copy them. I learned to expect it from Sony but Amazon built their business by using the internet to sell to the masses so I don't understand why they don't want to sell me a "Kindle Format" book. All I can say is that I will go to considerable effort to avoid buying anything from Amazon in the future and I doubt that's the customer reaction they were trying for.

And finally DRM (enter at own risk)

I think it's wrong to say the authors and publishers require it so we should be sheep and accept it. They are misguided to think they need it and they need to be constantly reminded of it.

It will never work for books, ignore what the "experts" are telling you it's all lies and they are preying on your fears. J.K. Rowlings had absolutely the most secure digital rights management system possible. She refused to publish her books in electronic format and you can't get any more secure digital rights management then not creating the digital piece to manage. Look how well it worked for her, we all know there's absolutely no illegal copies of her books. Despite that I think she's been fairly compensated for her time spent writing the books.

Keep it simple. The only DRM that is required is what I mentioned before. Insert meta data in the book that lists the purchaser, vendor, owner, purchase date and transaction number. Make it illegal to remove this data. If there is a copy without this data it's an illegal copy. If someone is technically savvy enough to remove this data they'll probably be able to remove the DRM.

Most customers are honest and want to compensate people for their work. The market place is to allow you to make a living and not to guarantee it.

I'm sure the whole eBabel and DRM will eventually work itself out but it's frustrating to wait. If you don't believe me write down my email address and contact me in 10 years time and we can see who was correct. I'd be happy to eat crow but I suspect you'll have the feathers sticking out of your mouth.

Finally

Thanks again. That was very therapeutic to get all those toxins out of my system. I feel all light and dreamy like I just had a herbal enema. I hope to return when I have more time but now I can crawl back in my dark corner and lurk like when I'm, at the beach. "Walking on the beaches looking at the peaches..."

[CChris]

Thank you all for the great time i spent here, checking for FedEx Mails, posting OrderNumbers, quickly posting the results and checking again...

It was great fun!

Now like Barcey i'm off to other things, mostly reading and earning some money, but still lurking around (can you say that?).

Naturally, i'm also converting books, mostly Gutenberg Stuff in German, other books i already possess in other formats; you know how things accumulate...

I like my books with nice covers and TOC's so thats how they will be made:
The good news: I am going to share with everybody.
The bad news: I am not going to post the books here, because i'm too lazy to check if ervey pic i use is license free, and if everybody around the world is entiteled to download legally...
(I'm even too lazy to distinguish between Fair Use, Creative Whatever, Public Area etc
So i'm going to put those books in my Shareazaa Share File.

Naturally, i am a Cybook Gen3 man now, so they will be there in PRC/Mobipocket format, but i think, they will also be present in ZIP, including a nice Cover, and a HTML/DOC with TOC.

Share them, enjoy them!
They are already in the "wild".


P.S: Hopefully, there is NO clue in the PRC-Format, indicating who did the books!
P.P.S: Ok, so i'm a little bit paranoid!

[RWood]

I too once thought of leaving MR, going back to my library, and reading. But the library is now gaining shelf space as the pbooks leave and the collection moves to electronic form. I find though that it is time well spent at MR reading about the devices and the content creation tools. Plus there is that over 2,000 volume free download library of hand crafted ebooks.

Sorry to see you folks go. Do check in from time-to-time to see what we're up to and to stock up on the latest free downloads. And Barcey, give the dog an extra scratch behind the ear for me.

[CChris]

Lurking = Reading new posts just once, or twice a week, not every day!

Lurking = Not so much posting...

Well, that contradicted itself....
(I should go to the New Year Resolution Thread)