Quote:
Originally Posted by carpetmojo
Sadly, at present, the book situation is nowhere near where the music business was.
The money involved was huge, as was the scale of bootlegging, and the industry had to find an acceptable compromise with an existing fait accompli, so they they could still make money.
I fear the consumer side of the equation with books is nowhere near being in a powerful enough position to seriously affect any of the publishing side's decision. We just aint strong enough, in numbers or power.
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IMO, the biggest difference is the technology. *Anyone* with a computer can rip a CD to an mp3 in less than five minutes; most programs that people already have will automatically label the tracks and even download the album artwork. In an hour you can rip 15-20 CDs, whether you own them, borrowed them from a friend, or borrowed them from a library.
Far fewer people have scanners at home, and scanning a book is time consuming, involves a lot of user input, and introduces OCR errors into the book. I suspect that 95%+ of people who have an mp3 player have ripped at least one CD. Probably less than 1/10 of 1% of people who own an e-reader have scanned a book and put it on their e-reader.
One consequence of the inconvenience of scanning books as opposed to ripping CDs is that DRM is much more valuable for e-books than it is for mp3s. Because it's much easier to get an mp3 directly from the source than it is for books.