Quote:
Originally Posted by danskmacabre
yes going back to the original discussion. I would like to be able to legally pass on ebooks (I.E. give to someone else and delete my copy) that I no no longer want.
I appreciate that people copy ebooks and pass them around, but I can't stop them doing that.
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And I so wish that was not the case. I'd love to be able to give away a bought e-book (Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, I bought that after seeing the movie Stardust and thought I'd try out a book of his, but didn't like it one bit) that I didn't like and just have it be a given that I didn't keep a copy for myself. But nope, so that is 10 dollars that I have sitting there rotting, with no appreciative recipients. It taught me that I don't want to buy e-books unless I have had a chance to read the entire book for free at the library and know I will love it. I learned my lesson.
With Printed books, had I bought it in printed form, it would have been no problem. I could give the book away if someone saw me reading it in the park, and they said, "Hey, I've always wanted that book!" I could say, "well, here you go, I am not enjoying it, have fun!" No need to share an ADE account, or whatever, easy peasy.
Go to bookcrossing.com sometime and see how many hands a SINGLE copy of a book gets sometimes. I've watched single copies of popular print-books get tracked (each copy has it's own personal "tracking" number) to dozens of people and still going strong.
It's largely why I prefer (to buy) physical media over digital media (one could argue that my DVDs and CD's are digital, but they are on a standalone physical unit that I can just give, nevertheless) I'm not stuck with some piece of crap that I bought and then changed my mind about. That's why I use my e-reader largely for the public domain stuff.
I wish it were legal to pass on e-books, because morally, if a person actually does delete all traces of it from their personal e-reader and computer etc, and practically, it is no different than physical book. Unfortunately e-books reproduce faster than rabbits, which is to their disadvantage rather than their advantage, when it comes to stuff you may want to pass on.