Quote:
Originally Posted by KenJackson
But there's a difference between a new and used pbook. The used one is a little scuffed up, might be marked up and might have coffee spills on a few pages. Few people would give a used pbook as a gift. You can sell it because you're not selling quite the same thing that was originally sold, and after each sale its quality decreases until after a while it " gets used up" naturally by wearing out.
But ebooks are totally immune to coffee spills. If there were no limitations on reselling, the same copy could be sold and sold and sold. Artificially limiting resales to a certain number could be done, but to what end? It would be an attempt to make an ebook behave like a pbook.
Reselling ebooks bears some similarity to recording a movie you received over cable (you paid for it, after all) and reselling it.
If the free market is allowed free reign, ebook prices will drop and there will be little incentive to resell them. Already, Smashwords authors sell books at a fraction of what bigger name authors sell them for. And that site seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. I see promise in that. |
A good hardcover book can last 100 years. Try opening a digital text file from the late 80s or early 90s. I will again reference the 4-5 hours I spent trying to find something that would properly open my dad's stories... .doc files, but from (probably) WordStar for DOS.
I had some old powerpoint files from my company that would no longer open in Powerpoint, even Powerpoint via Office XP I installed in a virtual machine. Digital files have a high rate of obsolescence.
IMO Digital files are probably more likely to be useless in 20 years than a hardcover is. .azw and .epub files from today's ebookstores will not necessarily be openable on a modern device in 20-30 years - or it may require a large amount of processing or conversion. And that's assuming you don't have any DRM to fight. A hardcover, though, if well-treated, will surely still be usable then.