Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Irving
Here's the basic problem. When I pay for a digital edition, I neither own it nor control it in the way I do a copy of the print edition. A print book I can keep for the rest of my life, lend it to a slow-reading friend for six months (and then another friend, and another, until I run out of literate friends), sell it used at a yard sale, or sell it for a profit to a collector if it happens to be a first edition of a well-known book.
The digital edition (if I follow all the rules and laws that apply in my country) may be good for the life of the company I bought it from, the company that runs the rights server, or the device I must read it on - whichever comes first. I can lend it, once, for two weeks, to someone who has the same reading device I do, and I can't legally resell it to anyone for love or money. And the formatting of said ebook may be way south of that of the print book, due to garbled scans, lack of editing, etc., or so my experience so far tells me. So if the publisher selling it wants to price it the same as, or for more than, the print edition, I'm paying the same price and getting much, much - MUCH - less. And the publisher is getting much, much more, while probably at the same time (as we've seen in the U.S.) trying by hook or crook to trick most authors (except for the "cream" who have tough agents, large sales, and a fleet of lawyers) into accepting the same royalty for a digital book that they would be getting for the print edition, even though the publisher's costs on an ebook do not include typesetting, printing, binding, warehousing, spoilage, shipping, etc. The record of certain agency-model publishers in that last respect is pretty shoddy, as we can see from a series of recent confrontations with the Authors Guild.
So while Amazon and other ebook sellers don't necessarily have pure motives for wanting to put ebook prices at a level that will maximize their cash flow, and perhaps allow them to monopolize the digital market, the publishers are the ones with the truly unclean hands in situations like this. They shouldn't let Amazon fix the prices (as Apple did with iTunes), but they should understand that trying to fix prices at print levels under the pretext of protecting their print business and acting as white knights for the very people - their authors - they are screwing will just squeeze both themselves and their authors out of the e-market for sure, and possibly out of a segment of the print market as well...
|
Bang on Ken.
There's an implication that we don't "own" but we've paid for the right to use the content.
It could be argued, along with the right to use the content, is the right to use it on whatever device we want, however, whenever, so long as we aren't making duplicates and spreading them around.
In Canada, the right to make a back-up of copyrighted material was challenged and the consumer won.
Of course the publishers are going to disagree and this will probably have to go to court before it's settled.
The "copyright tax" on blank media in Europe which gave tacit approval to make backup copies failed in Canada (North America?) because the content creators saw the precedent and didn't want to give that tacit approval to make a legal backup.