Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
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.
|
The parallel does not break down one bit.
how many people even had a PC back when a lot of us got into burning our own CDs? What did one cost if you didnt build it...or even if you did? How long did it take to rip a CD, and how many tries to get an unflawed rip? Much less time to manually insert all the track metadata.
And then chip players came out driving the demand for ripped music in thelate 90s with the RIO players, and internet databases started taking the work out of it.
But where we are now with books is very analogous to the early days of digital music. And the biggest threat book publishers face is exactly the same as the biggest threat music publishers faced...masses of artists who want to use technology available to be heard by a public with only so much buying power.
The pie will be cut up into a whole lot of pieces, and legislation will not stop it.
Again.