I read yesterday an article on the Atlantic,
The Monster Publishing Merger Is About Amazon - Penguin Random House purchasing Simon & Schuster is not the gravest danger to the publishing business. The deal is transpiring in a larger context—and that context is Amazon.
According to it,
Quote:
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[...] this merger is not the gravest danger to the publishing business. The deal is transpiring in a larger context—and that context is Amazon. The rise of Amazon accelerated the demise of Borders and the diminishment of Barnes & Noble. If it’s correct to worry about a merged company that publishes perhaps 33 percent of new books, then surely it’s correct to worry more about the fact that Amazon now sells 49 percent of them.
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Now, this "49% of books is sold on Amazon" is quite a remarkable piece of data. Part of that hefty size may also be an effect of the need for acquiring electronic versions.
My humble (brief) but happy (revealing things I did not expect) philological enquiry in a former thread showed that language distinguishes at least something you "manufacture" (transform to receive encoded information) ('book', 'libr-', 'paper') and something you "weave" ("elaborate") ('text'), thus that formula "a book is a container of text". But terms themselves are not important here and may vary - in fact I will for the rest of the post distinguish 'support' and 'text' for the sake of clarity. Now, in this context, the question is "what are you paying for" - because on the one hand the producer of the text may often demand a compensation, and on the other hand the producer of its support will have to.
If one paid for the text, they should be able to access it in any reasonable form (support). But the cost of the support is hardly ever trivial in commerce -, so both the paper construct and the electronic distributing service must be funded. But there may be an imbalance in the cheapness of providing a simple "download service (upon proof of ownership)".
I would develop on the idea that the irrelevance of the medium is facilitated - maybe that the publisher equips itself with the electronic distribution facilities.
The goal and main idea in fact would be, that
property of the text shall allow for the legitimacy of obtaining its file format. Meaning more clearly, that when one buys a paper-based book in a bookstore, they can later also download the electronic version.
This way, one can go browse for material in a traditional bookstore, enjoy all its advantages, contribute to the preservation of something important, and then also use the benefits of the electronic version (from customizable formatting to quick dictionary to study through abridgement). In a way, I would state that they already have such right: I believe that with the encoded-text-endowed-book you bought the text.
One publisher that provides such service is, for example, the Pixel series from publisher Egea (Bocconi University) in Italy: each printed item contains a unique code covered by silver paint to be scratched, and that code can be used to anonymously download the electronic version from the publisher's website.
[I hope this post's text is in good condition - I will only be able to check it and edit it later.]