Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Mr Ploppy, my fingerprint reader already 'registers' all ten fingers. It is common to have a particular finger, say, in a bandaid for a minor injury. Now if I lose all ten fingertips I have bigger problems than accessing my biometric-locked stuff...
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A fingerprint-scanner is a limited-accessibility filter. Even if it works for all 10 fingers (which means a creative person could have a group of friends all have access to the same ebooks), it's got problems.
It doesn't work if your hands are bandaged to recover from an injury. It doesn't work if your hands can't stop shaking long enough to slide over the scanner at the right speed. It doesn't work for people who don't have fingertips because their hands are misshapen or permanently damaged, which are indeed a tiny fraction of the population, but one that might be eager to read ebooks because paper might be a great frustration to them. Depending on the quality of the scanner, it may not work when your hands are swollen from exercise or illness. Might not work if you've spilled ink on your hands, or they're temporarily damaged by harsh chemicals. (I'm thinking scrub-the-sink chemicals, not dipped-in-acid-by-accident.)
And it hasn't been established how these fingerprints are tied to the purchase: does the seller keep a database of fingerprints? Can the government demand them? How will people be convinced to pay extra for ebook readers that only work with fingerprinted ebooks, and how will publishers deal with those who crack those ebooks to release a version that works on older computers & reading devices?
The answer to the piracy and payment problems isn't going to be "more expensive hardware, which everyone will be required to use to get access to content."