Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Of course you can, and that's absolutely fine if that copy is for your own personal use, but you're not suggesting that it would be legal for you to give the photocopy to someone else, are you?
That's the problem with trying to compare this with paper books: if you have a paper book, you're free to pass it around to your friends as much as you want - there's only one book in circulation. It's the fact that multiple copies of the book get created when you do this with eBooks that's the issue.
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It's true it's creating another copy, but really, how different is it? How many people read the same book repeatedly? Now, how many reads do you think you can get out of one book before it falls apart?
One person pays for a book, reads it, and it gets sold to a used book store, or even donated to their library. One book, which is to say one payment by one person, may be read a hundred times by a hundred different people, none of whom paid anything to the originator. This is the primary means of reading for a
lot of people, especially in this economy.
I know it was for me - I have an "in" at the local used book store, and I used to read for cheap or free all the time. I'm young and a broke student and if I bought everything I read new I wouldn't have groceries.
And yet I see no outcry to tear down used bookstores and libraries. Even though this is really not that different. Am I a bad person for mostly reading used books?