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I have about 3,500 ebooks. I've purchased none of them.
I have no objection for paying for electronic content. I have strong objections to the lack of a standard format that everyone supports, and to restrictive DRM.
I want to download an ebook once, and read it on whatever device I happen to have at hand. My current ebook device is a Tapwave Zodiac 2, which is a Palm OS device. My preferred format for electronic books is HTML, since I can read that native on desktop and laptop, and easily convert it for the Plucker offline HTML viewer for Palm OS. Most of my ebooks are in Plucker format.
But in order to cover all the bases, I must maintain eReader, MobiPocket Reader, PalmPDF, and PalmFiction (handling Palm DOC, zTxt, plain ASCII, RTF, and Word documents), and recall which text is in which format, read with which viewer. That's just nuts.
I'd love to actually buy ebooks, but until more publishers understand there is a market, settle on a common format, price reasonably, and don't saddle books with overly restrictive DRM, I'm not. There is more freely available in public domain, or under CC or other licenses that explicitly permit copying and sharing that I want to read than I have time for, so I'm not exactly lacking in stuff to read. And for the stuff that's only commercially available, I still buy a fair number of paper books, and consider electronic books an additional format, not a replacement for paper. I have some books in both formats.
At the moment, MobiPocket seems to be the closest thing to a standard format, and I can live with that. Versions of the viewer are available for just about everything save Mac OS/X, the format allows decently crafted ebooks, and the DRM provisions are as reasonable as I expect to see. If everyone got behind it and offered their books in that format, I'd buy in a heartbeat, but I'm not holding my breath waiting.
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Dennis
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