Quote:
Originally Posted by bill_mchale
2. While some small fraction of the population might read full books in a book store, it is safe to say that most people would prefer to bring the books home with them, and therefore will ultimately purchase the books they want to read all of. Further it is up to the book store, the current legal owner of the copy you are reading to limit your reading of said copy if they should choose (i.e. it falls under fair use).
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An interesting question is if that small fraction is bigger than the fraction of the population reading ebooks
I do not generally disagree with the above post, but to me the whole drm debate misses a very important point - how do you convince people to read ebooks?
People always bring mp3's, how they took off overnight and so on but that misses the fact that you always needed equipmnet to listen to music, music is a one dimensional stream where device size is irrelevant for most people, music is complementary not immersive most of the time - see people jogging and reading lately? driving and reading?...
DRM for e-books is just another obstacle to their acceptance and to me the only way we will advance the e-book cause is when publishers will get squeezed hard in revenue and will do anything to get more. Maybe the current recession will do, maybe the next generation of all purpose devices combined with the next generation of young people who are growing up with p2p, maybe Google books, maybe Amazon Kindle e-textbooks, but still e-books growing and all are insignificant in the book business so far so the question I posed above is not really facetious right now...