E-books improve, but not enough

[TadW]

At the moment, digital piracy of books barely exists because people have no comfortable way to read a digitized Tom Clancy thriller. Nobody wants to peer at a computer screen for a week. But if an electronic book were widely used, someone would scan Mr. Clancy. Turning the scan into text is easy with optical character recognition software, the kind that is bundled with scanners now. At that point best-sellers would be as piratable as music is today.
A lot of money is potentially in play here. Wait a few years.

... sez a guy in The Washington Times: http://washingtontimes.com/technolog...1321-3090r.htm

[Cthulhu]

So the industry says that no one wants to buy our shiny new toys, so we stopped making so many; customers say the new toys are too expensive, hollow, and we can't share our shiny new toys.

People on this forum go round & round regarding the legality and ethics of DRM software and circumventing it. Members get into flame battles over the best price for the shiny new toys.

Now some tech reporter--and personally, I think most of them suck/are schills except maybe people at WIRED b/c I figured they're too geeky to be bought--Says "the only reason people who read aren't stealing is because no one is able to steal."

Nice.

*sigh*

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I think the recent "Potterjack" demonstrated how easy it is to steal books, right now, if people want to.

People steal (non-necessary items) because they believe they are being taken advantage of, and they are rebelling against those who take advantage. If publishers convince readers that they are offering e-books at a fair price, people will pay that price, and theft will be kept reasonably low.

iTunes demonstrates this theory nicely every day... even with the availability of "hacking" SW to de-proprietize iTunes music, the service is satisfying its users enough that they do not take undue advantage, and iTunes stays profitable.

[NatCh]

What amazes me about this 'article' is the sort of ill-informed rubbish folks will print when they're not concerned that anyone will correct them. For example:

Judging by books displayed at Connect, prices will be about $14.

Why? Because that was the price of the first one he saw? He couldn't have looked much further than that.

Making a book available for paid download costs virtually nothing. The sales price is almost entirely profit.

I guess he's basing that on his idea that the Washington Times' site doesn't cost them that much to run.

When I read this article, I was more disappointed with the writer's laziness and arrogance than anything else. Folks who have no idea about such things who read articles like this .... Well it's disappointing.