We are in agreement about everything you are doing, of course. I am only using your message to continue my rant because I wanted to highlight this one aspect of your message:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rev. Bob
Probably about equivalent to your apparent compulsion to misread my intentions on this, which I clarified in the same post. I want people to be able to treat ebooks that use this license the same way everyone currently can treat physical books.
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YOU know exactly what you are doing, and you are doing all the right things, but because you choose to claim that you are doing your license "the same way everyone currently can treat physical books", you are MISLEADING many in your audience.
You are perpetuating the
myth that ebooks and pbooks are directly analogous and that what works for one CAN and SHOULD directly work with the other.
This is simply not true, and we would not really want it to be so. We WANT the advantages that ebooks give, like instant delivery and easy backup and transfer, and we need to deal with the differences, like the ability distribute an unlimited number of perfect, free copies at the touch of a button, to address the rights of content owners.
You are NOT making ebooks work "the same way everyone currently can treat physical books" as you know very well. What you are doing is giving users some additional rights over the ebook content. So I beg, you, please say it that way.
YOU and I know that "the same way everyone currently can treat physical books" is just shorthand to convey that, but many other apparently do not.
This is at the root of the "own" versus "license" mistake as well.
At some level, maybe subconciously, many people think that ebooks are just like pbooks.
The same people think that "owning" an ebook will somehow automatically let them do ALL the same things with it as they could with a pbook they own.
They do not seem to grok the idea that with a pbook, they "own" a hunk of paper and glue, which carries with it some content, which is licensed to them according to the terms of copyright law--rules governing an abstraction which everyone is at least passingly familiar with from living in a post-Gutenberg world.
With an ebook, there is no equivalent, and the ENTIRE process is ONLY about access rights to the ephemeral digital content, it is NOTHING BUT an abstraction, and it's a relatively new abstraction which is still having it's rules worked out.
We need to focus on making those rules, not get stuck in the abyss of thinking that saying "own" and "pbook" is good enough to get what we want.
It isn't.
OK, I think I'm done ranting for this thread.
ApK