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what is with this mindset that buying ANYTHING outside the retail chain is somehow shady or illegal? I am not talking about just ebooks but ANYTHING anymore. Someone somewhere is fostering the mindset that less expensive than retail, even used items being sold somehow harms the original maker and seller of the items.
In the book publisher world has long been frustrated by the large number of used bookstores in the US. Almost every town has one and they would love to do nothing but find a way to shut them down somehow. I now see them as trying to do an end around on the first sale doctrine, as ebooks are clearly not software but rather they are content or data if you will. Neither of which is software. Formatting of content or manipulation of content does not suddenly turn that content into software. Software is what is used to create, view or otherwise manipulate data/content. And software used for this purpose is no different than the printing press along with other machines used to create dead tree books. Nothing is different in the whole process, it is just the new machines (software) are small and cannot be seen working for the most part. Yet, the product they produce is indeed physically tangible it simply resides on a memory disk of some sort rather than paper.
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