Quote:
Originally Posted by Arek_W
So I went a bit furter & wrote:
[snip]
I think that all non-US residents who have SONY EReader should send this kind of pain in the "lower end" mails. When they see ppl going for Kindle, Bookean, etc & their sales hit the floor while customers were begging for books for which they wanted to pay they may reconsider. OR it will end up like BETA system or LaserDisks (remember them?)
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Thank you for sharing those messages from Sony. Yes, I remember Betamax but more importantly, so does Sony remember that since they were the ones burned the worst by that whole VHS/Beta fight. So when DVDs were about to hit the market, Sony went out and bought its own content (Columbia Pictures and all its subsidiary lines such as Columbia records) so that no matter what happened in the DVD wars, there would be content for whatever format Sony chose to go with.
I agree that people who don't like what happens at Sony's ebook store should complain -- I've mentioned several times when I found prices I thought were out of line (hardcover prices for ebooks which have been out in mass market paperback form at lower prices for a couple of years) and eventually the prices have fallen.
Especially international customers -- I agree that the logic of the traditional paper publishers won't really hold up in a global digital marketplace, and contracts with authors are being rewritten. One problem, though, is the existing contracts which are in place for currently published books. Both the publisher and the author need to agree to renegotiate the contract. The publisher can't simply change the terms of the contract against the will of the author who has already signed the existing contract. So it will take a while for the publishing world, which has always been bound (no pun intended) by tradition, to fully make it into the digital age. That it is happening as rapidly as it is currently is a miracle, in my opinion. And while it may seem glacially slow to some, it really is faster, and in my opinion, smoother than the music industry which simply put its foot down and refused to acknowledge the digital marketplace until way too late and the damage had already been done.
I'm sure the publishing industry is looking at how the recording industry has been decimated by the digital world and therefore is moving faster to avoid the same fate.
And the introduction of the Amazon Kindle may be the final catalyst needed to open the ebook marketplace up more fully -- Amazon's clout is enormous and what it does has a major impact on the marketplace (witness the practical disappearance at least in the U.S. of the much nicer locally owned bookstore which Borders and Barnes&Noble started to destroy and which Amazon nailed the final nails in the coffin for.) Even Borders and Barnes&Noble are hurt by Amazon's enormous power (I can get books far faster from Amazon than my local Borders or Barnes&Noble if they don't happen to have it in stock).
In the meantime, as is always the case, laws do force legitimate customers to become criminals sometimes since the laws are always written with the interests of the wealthiest parties in mind, not necessarily written with the concept of just and fair. That's why so many people, including judges, make the fine distinction that they are courts of law, not courts of justice.