Quote:
Originally Posted by AprilHare
Sollte Deutschen haben einen besseren Zugang zu eBooks?
Should Germans have better access to ebooks?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Feylamia
Hm, I don't think access to ebooks is an issue, tbh. All of the big book stores offer ebooks.
Germans tend to want to really own the stuff they buy, they are very slow to adopt any sort of rental models and they want to be able to use their stuff on all their devices. So I think DRM is plaguing the market more than availability issues.
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For me this is simply not true! I couldn't care less about DRM. For the last 20 years I have been giving away books to libraries, hospitals, friends and a non profit organization, simply I could not store them because until today I have read approximatly 4,500 to 5,000 books. As I buy them to entertain me, not other people I don't care if others are able to read my books or not.
But it is a problem to get the stuff I want to get. Yes, there are eBookShops all over the place but their offers are meagre. For example, S.Fischer Verlag publishes about 5,000 books and has turned only 550 of them into ebooks up to now. Same is true for everyone else. Most books are annoyingly bad made. There are the page number strewn into the text of the 3 Hans Falladas I bought the other day from AufbauVerlag. I pay the same price for their ebooks as for their pbooks and get a piece of crap for my money!
SuhrkampVerlag has an edition of Marcel Prousts 'Lost Time' translated and annotated by Luzius Keller, a highly acclaimed Proust scholar. I have two possibilities: Either I buy the pbooks (7) smythe-sewn, clothbound for 128€ or I buy
the ebooks (all 7) for 128€, now 110€. I won't be able to tap onto the footnotes to read them easily as, as stated by the editor of Suhrkamp in an email to me, it was their first ebook *yes, well*, but that does not prevent them from charging 110€ anyway. The paperbacks are 98€ btw!
I would love to buy Lion Feuchtwanger, but his books are not available as ebooks. I wrote an email to his publishers asking why they don't sell them as ebooks and why I can't search for ebooks on their website, but haven't received any answer.
Nabokovs publishers told me they have difficulties with foreign rights and thus are not able to sell Lolita as an ebook. How come? I wanted to buy the German translation, whats foreign with that?
Where can I buy Musil or Heimito von Doderer? Where do I get a copy of Fernando Pessoa?
There is none of the new highly praised translations of Stendhal, Tolstoi, Balzac or Laclos to be bought.
No, I want to spend but in the end, they just drive me into piracy instead of making me buy something!