Quote:
Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash
I'm curious to see what the market will be down the road ten, twenty years from now for ebooks vs pbooks.
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I still firmly believe that ebooks will travel the way of digital music, but they'll be doing it all about 10 years later.
We're now at the stage where digital music was at around 2002: the big ones are selling their stuff with DRM. Later, DRM will drop away. After that, books will become streaming.
It's already happening, with some services providing "all you can read, for $x per month", but you can only read the book in THEIR app, and only as long as you pay the subscription.
I've said it before, and I still firmly believe, that if the industry CAN go to streaming books page by page, then they WILL. They're trying it with music.
Therefore I'm hoarding CD's like an idiot, ripping to FLAC like a madman, and I'm buying as many books as I can (i.e., the ones I know I'll want to read soe day) for as low a price as I can find... hoping that there will be a way somewhere down the line to either listen/read to that stuff, or convert it to a format of that time.
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Yes, I'm paranoid and I don't trust companies to keep offering stuff forever. I firmly believe that they will make music, books, and software more and more dependent on subscriptions and (permanent) connection to the manufacturer's website.
Today I used the WayBack Machine to be able to download some files from an old version of a company's website, because the company removed them from their site in 2007; after 2006, the WayBack Machine doesn't have them anymore. I have a backup of those files on some old CD's, but taking a look in the WayBack Machine was faster.
Next week or so, I'll archive my old "maybe I'll need this somewhere in the future, but not likely" CD's into my current hard drive backups, because I also won't depend on the WayBack Machine to keep this stuff available.
This time, my "not likely" was proven wrong. It may prove wrong again later.
(For some reason, these files are not to be found anywhere else on the internet. Nobody seems to have archived them anywhere.)