Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
What proportion of your books do you read more than once? With me, the figure is very low. I have a few old favourites, that I read over and over, but the overwhelming majority of books I'll never read again.
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Oh, me too... but *I* pick the ones I re-read. Part of what I'm paying for is the option to decide that this book is a favorite, that I want to study every paragraph deeply and get my kids to read it, that I want to write fanfic to show a given conversation from the other character's point of view, that I want to analyze its assumptions and describe in detail how they support or fail to support some particular ideology.
If I want to memorize all the poetry in a given book, or act out one of its passages for my kids & their friends every other weekend, or compare its character development with other books in the same series, I'm buying the right to do those as well as just reading the book.
I don't care to do that with every book. Most books are 2-3 hours of entertainment (if I'm lucky... I read fast), and that's all; I never read or care to read them again. But which ones are more than that, is my choice as a reader. I won't put up with publishers or authors deciding which books are going to be important enough to me that I want a re-readable copy available forever.
Books with a reading limit go off my potential buying list. I don't currently download anything with DRM, much less pay for it; new ways to limit readers' ability to enjoy books are of no interest to me. I will not pay to be told how I must relate to a given work of art.