Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
But what about that is different from ebooks? The whole point is that ebooks and pbooks are all the same...
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Their content is the same (the text). But the medium is different. Ebooks are immaterial, they reside on various media (USB stick, HDD, SD card, internal flash memory, CD, DVD etc.), while a paperbook is unseparable from its support. Until the invention of the copier one could not give a copy of a book to a friend - that book had to be transcribed (in ancient worlds, this was done by scribs and took ages; in middle age this was done by monks, again in decades; later on the printing machine did not change the transcription, only the other half). Today one can copy/paste an ebook to another medium in seconds.
Being inseparable from the paper, the books can only be lent/borrowed as a package, including the support, that means the original owner has no access to it until he gets it back.
Like with the metro ticket example earlier, in each millisecond since printing that paper book is read by a single person (except of course the "reading evenings").