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I didn't mean lack of substance to mean lack of content. Just that the text isn't in an unalterable format. With pbooks you can alter things to a certain extent by ripping, burning or scribbling over the pages (though why anyone would want to I don't know) but the text itself doesn't change. You can't erase an e for example and put an a in it's place within a word, but such is childs play with a few ebook tools. I think that lack of physical substance is what some mean by an ebook not being a real book too. I do see ebooks as being just as real as their pbook counterparts myself but there is a difference between a physical book and one composed of bits of data. It's not an important difference (IMO) but there is one all the same. With records or CD's or DVD's you have a media that is generally unalterable. You can't erase them and record a new piece of music or movie once you have something on it. If you have a recording of say Kenny Roger's song "The Gambler" on a record or CD then you have a stable piece of media that you can touch, but who can touch an Mp3 of that same song? In that sense the song becomes a little less real in that it can't be directly touched. And an ebook is no different from that. It's still a book, still contains the same information that its pbook cousin has, but it's more fluid since it can go from say Kindle 3 to Kindle Fire to Kindle for pc etc. so that the media used to read said text changes in the blink of an eye. You don't see that with records or CD's. I think its that point psychologically that allows people to not consider it wrong to seek illegal copies. I also think that if there were a thread for those who havn't acquired an illegal copy of an ebook that it would be very short. All people are subject to temptation after all and who hasn't wanted to have an ebook version of a text that may not even have a legal ecopy yet. Or who hasn't wanted a copy of a book that is (for some reason) set at a price that looks insane?
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