Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Plus in many first world countries at least there is a very good library selection available in most locations.
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For native literature. 100% of the fiction I have bought this year was not in my native language. (This isn't too uncommon for continental Europeans, I think. Or perhaps I'm just really strange!
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I can afford to buy the books I read, and I agree that e-books don't break the bank of people who have even mediocre jobs, but if I were unemployed and had to make do with welfare, I couldn't afford e-books, not at €8+ for a novel that I read in a day or two.
A core issue, I feel, is that e-books cannot be sold or bought "used". In the software world, there are now a handful of EU court rulings that confirm that licenses can be sold second-hand regardless of the vendor's terms (case of Oracle vs. UsedSoft), and this was also confirmed for games (see
here). A German consumer protection organization is currently
preparing a lawsuit against Valve/Steam in the same matter.
In theory, the same should apply to e-books. Plenty of people would not re-sell their e-books, but just knowing that they could, if they so choose, might go a long way when it comes to buying vs. pirating. The trouble is that it isn't easy to implement, though, since the vendors would need to transfer the licenses, and there's more than one company that sells e-books, and they can be read on any device without any kind of authorization process. Possibly having to trade in a lot of freedom for the ability to re-sell e-books may not be desirable.