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Originally Posted by abookreader
I have no doubt that there are some in Publishing who are chomping at the bit to find a way to make eBooks "wear out" the way their physical counterparts do. I'm sure that some realize it would be a Public Relations disaster .... but given their actions over the past couple of years I'm not confident that would stop them.
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I expect we'll see a couple of attempts within the next year or two. The big 6 publishers really haven't yet realized they have serious competition in the ebook arena. In bookstores, they get the vast majority of the shelf space; whatever systems they decide on (pricing, cover art standards, reprint policies, etc.) will be what the readers put up with. In ebook stores, they're so far able to rely on the print world's advertising carrying over to ebook popularity--but if they start getting too restrictive, and small presses & self-pubbed books don't, that'll change.
I think the next "stage" in ebooks is small publishers & self-publishers getting access to Overdrive, so their books can be lent by libraries. I've no idea what that would cost, but with two of the big 6 refusing to do library ebooks at all, and another one about to be boycotted out of a lot of them, there's certainly space for libraries to offer less-known authors & books. Libraries should be talking with Overdrive about what it would take to set up access for Smashwords' premium books.
The ability to say "borrow the book for 2 weeks with DRM from your library, or buy it with no DRM from Smashwords," would be a major blow to the big-6 monopolistic approach to the marketplace.
But I don't see signs that the publishers are thinking about this. I expect at least one of them to try forced retirement of ebooks within the next year--either "expires after X date," or "only download 6 times, once per registered device" or something similar. They believe they've established legally that ebooks are licensed, not purchased, by saying so on several sites. (And they *really* don't believe that, by setting limits like that, they're establishing a legal case that previous purchases were purchases, not licenses. Someone's now got grounds to point out that Harper Collins books sold through Amazon are not licensed because they don't expire.)