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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Must?
Don't hold your breath. First, someone has to see a way to make money on it.
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The reseller, just like with pbooks. Or any other intermediary.
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Second, there are pesky rights and permissions issues. Who owns the rights to the book? Who has authorization to issue an electronic edition such as you imagine?
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It doesn't matter how complex the legal/contract issues are. Digital texts are marketed as "books," not "licensed software plugins" that you "access" with a program. That means people think of them like books... and when done with a book, a lot of us hand it to someone else to read, or resell it.
They can remove the "resell" option from the legal realm; they can't remove the ability to hand it off. (They're trying really hard with DRM.) What they're managing is to keep word-of-mouth promotions of ebooks down to furtive, backroom conversations while killing real publicity, because "I love this author--you should fork over $10 and find out if you like him too" has never been how books got a foothold into a new audience.
For ebook publications to thrive in the future, instead of remaining a weird crossover of "geek hobby" and "luxury entertainment," they need a parallel to the used pbook market.
I don't know how it can work; I just know it needs to show up, or ebooks will remain as they are now--great for people who can afford to pay full price for every book they read, great for people able to scrounge the internet for rec lists of obscure titles or links to unauthorized copies, but useless for students, the poor, people in hospitals, and other large categories of people who support the joy of books without buying new copies.