Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use, if a commercial eBook is not commercially available - in that scenario, the author is being correctly recompensed.
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How about buying the book second-hand? The author was compensated, but not for *your* reading, just like if a person buys a DRM'd ebook, strips the DRM, and gives it to a friend.
I have probably only bought a few hundred books new in my life. (And most of those were role-playing game supplements.) (I have hopes of living above the poverty line sometime in the next few years.) I have read many thousands--library books, books from friends, books from yard sales, books from flea markets. The majority of the books I have read, gave their authors no royalties.
I don't feel any guilt over all those books I've read without paying the author; if the author "should be" paid for those, then loaning and reselling books "should be" illegal. They are not--instead, they are the basis for a rich culture of information sharing.
Ebook publishers are trying to cripple that culture, to make it impossible to treat ebooks like pbooks. However, they want to capture the interest that people have in "books," not in "digital information sources." By calling them "books" rather than something else, they affirmed that they should be treated, in the reader's minds, like books.
And books can be shared. Books SHOULD be shared; it's a rare person indeed who loves books because he's paid full price for the first ones he read. (Most of us discovered them through our parents; many of our earliest reading experiences were from a type of sharing that the Kindle doesn't allow: one person buys it, reads it, and hands it to a family member to read at their leisure.)
The idea that "I buy pbooks, and when I'm done reading, I throw them in the paper shredder," would appall many people. Such a waste! So many people would love the chance to read those books! Donate them to a library or a poor school; give them away to a shelter. But the same people will happily advocate, "I buy ebooks, and when I'm done reading, I delete them." Which, to those of us who grew up reading secondhand books, sounds like waste.