Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
Don Quixote is a story.
I read Don Quixote on my Kindle.
Therefore, I read a story on my Kindle.
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Fixed that for you. :-P
But seriously, "book" is a rather imprecise word for the discussion at hand. Narrowly defined, a book is a physical thing - a bound collection of things that contain writing. Used to be sheets of beech wood/bark (hence the germanic word), now it's paper held together with twine and/or glue. More broadly, we also call all manner of stuff that comes in book-form a book.
You are now arguing that something that is definitely not in book-form, and is not even a physical thing, is also a book, simply because it contains an electronic representation of the same things that can also be delivered to us in physical book form. This may be a more or less valid view if the only people you are talking about are writers and readers. And sometimes, that's all there is. As soon as you add publishers, vendors and a economic and legal system into the mix, things can and do get a whole lot murkier.
Mind you, I'm all against DRM and for consumers having the same rights with e-books as with physical books. That doesn't change the fact that as far as many legislations (as well as the author's/rights holder's viewpoint) are concerned, they are not, in fact, the same thing. And given that one is a physical object and the other isn't, I'm unsure just how much you can bend those legal systems to actually treat them the same.