Quote:
Originally Posted by Erinath
To me, it is no worse than borrowing a book from a library.
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Not so - in the UK at least, the author will benefit, even if only to a small extent, from library borrowings. They won't benefit from secondhand sales - and you could argue that people who buy secondhand might have bought the book at full price, had the secondhand version not been available, so giving books away to charity shops is actually depriving the author and publisher, even though we are getting a nice warm feeling over those kids in Africa, elderly people, etc, who have benefitted from our generous donation !
Whichever way you look at it, the model doesn't cope with the 21st century - what bugs me about it is that publishers had plenty of time to prepare for ebooks.
I know it's not (always) legal, but I don't lose any sleep over picking up free downloads of books I've already bought at full price - for me, that's the legacy situation.
For most fiction books, my preference now is to read as eBook. I'm perfectly happy to pay for this, but don't see why I should pay over the odds. So it should be possible to buy the eBook version at no more than whatever the going rate is for the most recently published edition - so a "new launch" premium, in line with the hardback edition, followed by a paperback-equivalent price, including matching "two for three" promos.
If the eBook isn't available at the same time as the printed version, to my mind it's no surprise that it ends up being pirated. Publishers need to realise that most of us are just as keen to read the latest books, but we want to read them in electronic format !
I'd also like to see eBooks available in libraries (subscription or public).