Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
$140 is, unfortunately, not out of line for a textbook in many fields. http://www.amazon.com/Civil-Procedur...4349730&sr=8-7
It should come as no surprise to anyone that etextbooks are tightly DRM'd; if they weren't, a huge percentage of students would pirate them. (Claiming: (1) it's too expensive; (2) publishers are greedy; (3) professors are greedy; (4) universities are greedy; (5) university bookstores are greedy; and (6) everyone but me is greedy...I deserve free books). |
I would happily pay the asking price for the ebook (well, I'd grumble a bit, but I'd pay) if paying for it actually enabled me to
buy the ebook. I'd throw in the quibble that an electronic textbook should be formatted so that it is as readable as its print counterpart (many are riddled with formatting errors which make the text unpleasant to read), but that's a side issue. My main problem is:
A book that I've bought should not expire. I've kept most of my university textbooks and refer back to some of them years after the course has ended. I don't want to go anywhere near books which go dead.
Also, given that it's an ebook, I'd like to be able to read it on my ebook reader. It should not be locked to my computer screen only.
The claim is always that books (music/videos/games) HAVE to be DRMed, or else they'll just be pirated. In the case of books, I don't think that this makes much sense. Digitizing a paper book for free is possible, but it is quite time-consuming and extremely tedious. Given the choice, I would always choose to pay for a book that the publisher has digitized for me, but who would pay to
rent deliberately crippled software?
http://xkcd.com/488/
A few publishers have tried offering non-drm books for sale. In the case of O'Reilly, their ebook sales actually increased. In the case of David Pogue, although the book was pirated, his sales stayed the same or actually increased slightly. Both experiments make interesting reading.
http://boingboing.net/2010/01/22/ore...ops-ebook.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/11...l#previouspost