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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Ebooks are a whole new area and can be sold or lent innumerable times. Are you saying this should happen? An author sells a dozen or so books for 9.99 and then it is free for everyone? Without restricting lending/copying of ebooks that is the way it would be.
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I don't think anyone is asking for a free for all, just not be so draconian.
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
If you make and sell a lawnmower and ten people use it, it will eventually wear out. Maybe you would prefer to sell one lawnmower per person right away, but you know that unless the lawnmower never breaks or becomes obsolete you will sell more lawnmowers.
Not so with ebooks. They can be duplicated infinitely. Science fiction coming to life as in the stories of replicators. Imagine anyone being able to replicate what you sell/produce. No money no job. Sure you can replicate your own cheeseburgers and diamond rings and wouldn't starve to death, just as authors could get all the books they want.
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There are plenty of ways to make money in other ways. I mean, look at the number of websites out there that are making tons of cash, while their users don't pay anything. Are you paying to use Facebook? Reddit? Google? You can still make money without charging customers. And even if you do charge customers, lacking DRM doesn't make it so you'll not have any sales. Look at O'Reilly, they're a well known publisher, and do not use DRM on any of their books. They've actually tracked a rise in sales after they dropped DRM. Isn't that kind of the opposite of what you're proposing would happen if there were no DRM?
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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Publishers/authors restrict the amount of times a book can be borrowed from a library or demand that if you have one copy you lend one copy. Seems reasonable to me.
A library buys a book for say 9.99 and lends it 27 times. Chances are that 2+ of that 27 borrowers would have bought the book. Publisher/author is out money.
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Only lending one at a time per license purchase of a book isn't a big deal. No one is arguing against that. The problem is with the limited number of times it could be loaned out. 27 is a low number. That is one years worth, if it is checked out for 2 weeks. My library defaults to 1 week loans on ebooks, so 6 months. How many paper books are unusable after 6 months or a year? Hell, I've seen books at the local library that are decades old, that had been checked out dozens of times.
Are you going off the assumption that they would of had two or more additional sales if a library copy had not been available? That might be so, but if that is your argument, then you will also need to find out how many people read the library copy and then purchased it because they enjoyed it? This is somewhat related to some studies I've seen on piracy (if you think of it from the standpoint that should a free copy not been available would you still have got the book), that showed that the vast majority of the people who pirated something would not have bought it if they had no other alternative, and on average a larger portion of those people who pirated ended up buying it than those who would have only bought it if they had no other option. Also those in the studies who did buy copies of things they had pirated ended up buying related works.
Friend of mine pirated the first Dresden Files book after I had recommended it to him. I only had an ebook copy, so I didn't have a paper book I could loan him. The library didn't have a copy, so he couldn't borrow it from the library. He didn't want to buy it, because he wasn't sure if he'd like it, so that is why he pirated it. He started reading it, and immediately he enjoyed it, so much so that he went out and bought all of the books in the series (which it was on the 12th book at the time). I've heard tons of stories who've done the same thing after reading a book from the library. People are often hesitant on spending money about something they're unfamiliar with. Libraries allow people a legal means to try something first.