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Originally Posted by CyGuy
Personally, I could see ebooks becoming far more common and paper books becoming less common. I love reading ebooks myself. However, there are a couple of small issue to overcome and one HUGE issue to overcome.
First, DRM in any form must be made illegal. Any ebook that is available for sale to the general public must not have any form of DRM, ever, for any reason.
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Nice thought. Not gonna happen. Does "all forms of DRM" include locked PDFs? Word docs set to read-only? Enhanced ebooks with videos that can only be viewed on proprietary software?
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Second, a standard format must be selected.
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Because printed books come in exactly one format: one type of paper, one font, one type of binding. They are all readable under all lighting conditions and can be handled the same way.
A standard format isn't going to happen because different types of ebooks, like pbooks, will have different customer bases. A dominant-marketplace format may emerge--I'm voting on ePub--but it won't drive PDF into nonexistence; it won't drive out plain HTML or RTF in some markets, either.
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Third, the current pricing scheme is way off. The price of any ebook should be approx half the cost of the cheapest paperback version.
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I do like this. I expect it'll be quite a while before that happens.
The real thing holding ebooks back from taking over most paperback sales is lack of easy, legit ways of sharing them with friends. *That's* the technical hurdle that need to be tackled, and publishers need to get over the idea that every purchase is only going to be read by one person.