[Katsunami]

I'm going to put some oil onto the blaze here... forgive me.

Why would someone go through the hassle of lending a digital book from someone (with restrictions of 2 weeks per book, only once per book, and so on) when he can get it for free from a torrent, forever, within seconds...?

In my opinion, the point is still the same: often, piracy is easier / cheaper / less restrictive than the official ways, and as long as this is so, piracy will never go away.

I said it in two other posts already. Look at GoG.com. They sell games with no restrictions, with tons of extra stuff, fully patched up to the latest version, and patched extra to be able to run a 10-15 year old game on Windows 7. No CD-cracks, no restrictions. Prices are between $2.95 and $9.95 depending on the age of the game.

With those prices, these prices, and that service of making a game runnable on Win7, while the original even doesn't do that, I don't even think about pirating that stuff.

The only thing they ask is: "Please don't give our stuff away, OK?" And they sell games by the millions.

That's the way to go against piracy: providing more value on the original products; provide more value than the pirated versions can. Providing more restrictions will just *cause* piracy.

For eBooks that could be:
- No restrictions, available in all formats. If you buy a book, you can download in all formats that exist up to that day (with new formats added in the future if necessary).
- Impeccable layout and markup, which a pirated and scanned copy mostly never has.
- Very good price (some authors/publishers seem to start to grasp this already)
- Easy to get: Log into the store, buy with one click, SEND. Like Amazon, but have the file sent to a normal mail address with a specific subject in the mail: [EBOOK] A Title by Author. On the Reader: Press "Get Books". The reader needs to be set up to fetch only the mails with the specific [EBOOK] subject.
- Make this workable between any store, and any reader.
- Add options to send all your books at once.

Amazon already has part of this, and it's one of the reasons that the Kindle is so successful. Apple has it too, with the iPod and other iDevices; and they're successful too. After the ease of use and added value parts where done (in the music industry), sales shot up by many percents. This can happen in the eBook-world too, and not only with Amazon.