Quote:
Originally Posted by akiburis
Why not just accept that an ebook is a different thing from a paper book? A paper book is an object that you can buy and, having bought it, own outright. A commercial ebook is something else, something that you pay to use under certain limited terms and conditions. Not altogether unlike like buying a ticket to a movie, when you pay just to see the showing you paid to see. You may not like this, but that doesn't in the least affect the legitimacy of publishers' reasons for treating ebooks differently from paper books, because they are something different from paper books.
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oh ? so how do you explain that the publishers want me to pay as much as a paper book (and frequently as much as a HARDCOVER paper book), for this commodity which i only rent, never own ?
i think here is where i must agree to disagree with
you 
, since this attitude on the part of the publishers seems to be fundamentally incoherent (and unacceptable, to me). either i pay a reasonable price for a book (which still should be significatly less than a paper book, but that's a different topic altogether), which i then own ; *or* i pay a fraction of the price of a paper book to rent the ebook, for a limited, arbitrarily decided by the publisher, time (and when i say a fraction, i mean maybe 10%, not 90%). even at a drastically reduced price, this second possibility is not really satisfactory to me, since as i have mentioned, if i don't want to keep a book i will get it from my library (for free). also, someone (Harry ?) recently mentioned somewhere that the president of one of the largest ebook stores considers that he sells *books*, not licences.
the argument of whether ebooks are the same as paper books seems to be highly versatile, as depending on the context people seem to maintain alternately that they *are* and also that they are *not*, with equal vigor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
To Zelda:
With the proliferation of "Starbucks" here the term "for the price of a cup of coffee" has changed from $1.20 or so to $8 (the average price of a medium sized latte at SB, no I hate coffee thank God.)
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8$ for one cup of coffee !!! gloups !!
at those prices, i would switch to tea as well
we have starbucks here too but i think they're for tourists.
EDIT : and also : what Geoff and Tirsales said.