Quote:
Originally Posted by DustyDisks
Methinks that the age stated is much higher than 21.This mind set has been around much longer than 21 years. More like since the first floppy's became popular for mass storage, 640kb and up.
|
Longer than that really, if you include reel to reel recorders and cassette tapes. And a comic mart I used to go to in the early 80s had someone selling photocopies of rare books.
But I was thinking about mp3 and ebooks specifically. People started buying devices to use them on in the late 90s, but legal downloads only really became available in the mid-00s. The logical thing to do would have been to have legal downloads available from the start, as soon as people started consuming them in large quantities. Once people are used to getting something for free it is very difficult to get them going back to paying for it again.
iTunes and similar took off because the price of the hardware came down to a level that enticed a lot of new owners into buying them, and the availability of legal downloads meant they didn't need to look anywhere else for them. I think that's likely to happen with ebook readers too.
The people who download unauthorised files are already lost, calling them thieves, mind-rapists, terrorists or whatever else you can think of won't make any difference, they'll just make fun of you in Youtube cartoons. It's the consumers who came along after the legal downloads became available who matter.