Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
But that is not a real difference if you do not run out of available used books. Today when you can use the net to buy a used book you can always find it if it exists.
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The only real obvious difference is that with an e-book I can spam thousands of people at the push of a button, but with a tree-book it's one copy being passed around.
But for me, I find the "end-user" experience of sharing tree-books to be no different than if I had the e-book and if it were legal to share. I used to swap a crapton of printed books with folks at
BookCrossing and it outraged authors as much as if it were piracy. (In the bookcrossing forums some authors hated the idea of "the world's largest library")
In
theory it kind of makes sense that an author is as outraged for physical bookswapping, the end result is the same, pretty much with the exception that with an e-book, it makes a copy. It's just a slower form of pretty much the same thing. (except try calling it "piracy" with a straight face) but it's the one reason I still prefer tree-books in some respects. With e-books being all the rage, people are passing out tree-books like candy.
For me, if I have a zillion printed books and I am only reading one at a time it is no "less convenient" to me to not physically have said treebook at my address than it is to have it sitting on my shelf unread. So physically swapping a book is the way to go.