Doubled edged sword as are most things. It's great to have books easily available (depending on pricing etc. ) but not so great to have them located somewhere other than your computer/ebook reader. If it's free, the cloud is great. If I pay for it, then I expect to be able to copy it to my device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kaleissin
The publishers in my country (Norway) are skipping over the entire "problem" of downloadable ebooks by hosting ebooks in the cloud and supplying apps to access them. Pricing per book will start from USD 50 or so, same as hardcover. Article in local paper (translated)
Now, this scares me more than I can properly express. If you thought Amazon was evil for deleting "1984" from Kindles... with apps like these they'll know what you read, when you read it, and where you read it (it phones home). The only way to share is to lend someone the device the app is on. Here comes the big one:
They can edit the content of the files any time they want to. And they see this as a good thing.
I should mention that the big publishers in Norway own all the big bookstore chains, so they already have a cartel on books. They have used this in the past to prevent others from selling and publishing books. I don't understand why the "gummint" allows them to do this but they always look the other way. Books are so precious that corruption is OK, apparently. |