Quote:
Originally Posted by davers
I don't get the whole piracy thing. I mean, I've literally thousands of paperbacks and hardcover books. I've bought from book stores, used book stores, second hand shops, and I've gotten books from other people when they were done reading. Why should an electronic edition be any different from the paper edition? If I can give a paperback to a friend and they are able to read it, how is that different from giving an electronic version to a friend so they can read it? Ah well...just waxing philisophical I guess..
Dave
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I think the real problem is that electronic texts have an unrestricted supply. If I loan books or borrow books from the library those are books that can't be loaned out or borrowed until they are returned again - one loan per book at a time - which doesn't hurt publishers too much. If I buy a used book the publisher doesn't make any money, but there's one less used book out there for other prospective buyers to consider against the new book.
An electronic book that I "loan out" on bittorrent or IRC can then be loaned out again and again and again without end. Which could be thousands or tens of thousands of times people read what started from me, all without payment to the author.
Its a fair question whether capitalism is a good model to strive for here. Capitalism works *great* when there is a limited supply on both the creation and consumption end (cars, for example). We don't even try capitalism when there is an unlimited supply on both the creation and consumption end (air, gravity) - there'd be no point and it wouldn't work. With stuff we can store as bits there is a limited supply on the creation end (someone has to write the game or novel, record the song, etc.) and a naturally unlimited supply on the consumption end. The capitalist, anti-piracy people point vigorously at the creation end. Those who raise the jolly roger point vigorously at the consumption end.
If I were king of the world, I'd calculate how much content creators get paid, in average and in total. I'd then institute taxes according to the total and distribute money based on download rates, making the downloads free and abolishing copyrights on electronically reproducable media. Distribute money, I should say, directly to content creators - not to leeches like the RIAA, MPAA, etc. (I don't count most book publishers in the leech category, but I'd still rather see authors paid directly. They could then pay others for marketing, editing, etc. as needed.)
Oh, and so this post is technically on topic, I think .rtf and .html are definitely the most future proof. Neither is likely to go away in the forseeable future and both are capable of marking up most books.