Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_librarian
Because you could, easily. Unlike with paper books you're not handing over the "original", as it were, you're making an electronic copy anyway. It's digital restriction management hard at work, trying hard to bring artificial scarcity to this new world of ebooks.
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The content is what is important here and not the actual delivery mechanism be it physical book or eBook. More than one person would be using the content which you've only paid for once.
At the end of the day, authors and publishers do need to get paid and totally unrestricted copying and lending of books would affect that. The barrier for physical books is that it is a lot of work to duplicate one. That doesn't happen if it is an eBook since you can copy one in a fraction of a second.
I'm okay with the restrictions imposed by having a physical book. You can't use it when somebody else is using it. You're free to do whatever you want with it in terms of lending so you can lend it out multiple times for various amounts of time. If eBooks used a similar system then I'd be happy with it.