Thread: Why do ebooks cost so much?
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Old 01-19-2013, 05:41 AM   #31
medard
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg View Post
It's a little more complicated than that, I know, because convenience and risk factors mean nothing is totally free. You could assign a price to the risk of getting a computer virus from a cyberlocker site.
There are even more risks than that. There could be malware or spyware in such an ebook (article about this in german) or, even worse, the uploader could have changed the ebook content, which is not very difficult to do.

Since epub is an open format, you can never be sure that a copy of an ebook is similar to the original. You can't archive epub files, even if they're free of DRM, because you have no proof that they are original, unmodified ebooks.

There's only one way for now to make sure that you got a copy of the original ebook: By downloding it directly from the original source yourself. And that does not need to be a store, it can be a public or private library system, too.
Last edited by medard; 01-19-2013 at 05:47 AM.
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