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Originally Posted by AnemicOak
Other than a few rare books that went for big $$$ I've personally never sold a book and rarely given one away although I have loaned them out.
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What is your end game for books you own?
If you just read them and then discard them (a perfectly reasonable thing to do), you have nothing to lose with the current ebook regimes.
If you hoard them like I do, then there are real risks to your collection. You cannot be confident that you will still have access to them in a few years. You cannot transfer them to someone else.
On the bright side, the physical storage space required by an ebook is a lot smaller than that required by a mechanical book.
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For myself the convenience factors that eBooks present are a big plus and I can still load books by loaning out an old reader with the book(s) on it.
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Loaning old readers doesn't scale very well -- DRM limits how many readers can be authorised on a single account and how many old readers do you have anyway. Perhaps it works well enough for you.
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Entirley possible if you don't pay attention to things and convert older formats at the time new formats start becoming prevalent. ePub is basically just a zip file with XHTML inside (Mobi's basically HTML inside too). I doubt either HTML or ZIP (or the ability to utilize them) are going anywhere in my lifetime so I hope to have a way to read/convert my books even if ePub and Mobi were to disappear tomorrow.
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With DRM, it is highly unlikely that you, the owner of a copy, can choose to convert that copy between formats. Unless you break DRM.
Digital Rights Management enforces what the publisher / platform owner chooses to give you as "rights". Converting away from a DRM system is not likely one of them. Certainly not one you can count on.
I have had stuff stranded on old media (without DRM). I gave away a box of 78 RPM records because I don't have a player for them. I have a large box of 9 track computer tapes and no drive to read them. I have some 5.25" floppies that may no longer be readable. I even have a paper tape for my Altair with the original Micro Soft BASIC and no paper tape reader. That's another problem, one caused purely by my procrastination.