Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
Is there a genuine distinction between getting a library book and renting a book? Is one relatively neutral, while the other is harmful?
Thoughts, please.
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I think that these (all four of them) are increasingly illusory categories.
In a digital world, the only thing that matters is convenient access to a digital file for a useful period of time.
What content providers do is try to monetize that access through the use of convenience fees in relation to time. So in the case of ebooks, they "sell" access to someone for a large convenience fee involving no time limits or "rent" it to someone for a smaller fee involving time limits. Or "license" it to a library for a specified number of lendings.
But it's still all convenience and time. What we see proliferating around us, whether in the world of music, or video, or ebooks, or emagazines, or enews, are various configurations of the amount of the convenience fee relative to the time duration of consumer access to the digital object.
Last night I dropped a bundle on tickets to Met at the Movies. I want to go to seven of the movies over the next seven months. A ticket for the opening night is $22, and for the "encore" night about three weeks later is $18. The difference of $4 is the convenience fee for those who want to see the movie sooner rather than later at a less convenient time. I could buy a ticket on Fandango for a convenience fee of $2, saving me the time & trouble of going to the actual box office to buy the ticket. Suffice it to say that when I did the math, I decided to hop in the car and take about an hour to drive to the theatre & buy the tickets there.
If all I were buying were one ticket, it would make little sense to spend an hour to save a couple of bucks. But because I was buying all the tickets at once, in pairs, I was saving more like fifty bucks by trading some of my own time for sidestepping the convenience fees.
And that's the way I think about ebooks. I have very little interest in continuing to possess ebooks for longer than it takes to read them. But I am the kind of person who reads several books at a time, so it takes me days, weeks, or even months to finish any particular book.
I'm willing to pay a reasonable convenience fee to insure unconstrained access over time to the ebook. I am not, however, willing to allow the provider to constrain me from reading an ebook at my own pace on my preferred device. If the convenience fee for doing that is sufficiently large, I'll "drive to the theatre" by stripping the DRM. I'll trade my time for money.
Over in the music section of the digital marketplace, it's much more obvious that the negotiation between the provider and the consumer is really about convenience. There is no longer much nonsense about DRM - what we have is a variety of different approaches to convenience based on differing levels of fees. Movies are...well, moving...toward that type of market. Eventually, ebook providers will get there, I suspect.
It's not that I expect the providers to give ebooks away for free. If they want to negotiate in terms of time & convenience, by providing the content in a number of different accessible (i.e., non-DRM) forms which suit me, I'm perfectly willing to pay a reasonable convenience fee. I think most people are.
In the meantime, I treat ebooks like I do music or movies. I will not pay for "owning" or "renting" or "borrowing" ebooks. The providers are using those categories to try to maintain an analogy between the physical and digital marketplaces. This is a kind of misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of what they actually have to sell. If they insist on using those categories in an attempt to make me pay physical prices for digital objects, I'll maneuver my way around them as best I can.