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Originally Posted by NatCh
I think I'm just trying to keep the concept of a book as a discrete object, and trying to preserve the flexibility that it entails. 
And that may not be possible, or even desirable. |
I'm starting to see where you guys are coming from. Thanks.
As far as the book concept, I think you can do that today with eReader. with the exception that there are limits wrt giving the book away. You could pass on the book, and enter the code on the other person's pda or computer (it's your credit card used to buy the book, so you wouldn't want to actually give it to them in most cases). But if they have to reload the handheld from scratch or switch devices, they'd have to get the code again from you. And of course I don't know whether that kind of flexibility is intended by an eReader book sale.
So all you have to do is put one book per SD card right now. That becomes your library, and you pop the card in for the book you want to read. As long as you stick to authenticated devices (no limit, but they have to have your code entered), it's analagous a physical book. But you just aren't able to, say, sell it on eBay (nor would the Motricity folks be happy with that either). And you can't read it on devices that don't have eReader available on them, but a similar situation would occur with protected EBSD card books also. (Yes, I did catch that you made this up, KA, and it's a really handy way to refer to the idea in this thread where people likely know what we mean!)
The idea of limiting the EBSD card readers to dedicated devices seems interesting, but if you limited the ability to read the book so much that you can't read on the computer at all, that might be a bit limiting. And would the industry really support a new hardware standard at reasonable prices just for e-books? It would be a more expensive proposition, I would think, even if you could manufacture on the same equipment as regular SD cards, and just tweak it slightly. But with economies of scale, maybe. An intriguing idea, anyway.