|
One thing that occured to me when the original poster mentioned ebooks being disposable is that gosh darn it yes they are. In todays linked electronic world is there any reason (aside from DRM and highly restrictave companys) that there should be more than 1 library copy of a book. Should not eBooks / eMagazines / Technical Journals be Load, Read, Remove. Sure you may want to one day go back to them so all you need is an index some way to conceptualize your past selections.
The only thing that should not be disposable about eBooks is access to them, and fair payment for the use (that however is another issue).
I see no reason what so ever that we should all have our catalogues of eBooks along with the source material. Of course considering the ammount of work that can go into preparing a particular text to work correctly in your favorite viewer on the available hardware, unless the text is immediatly retransferable the this can become an issue in the transient book view.
This is only playing devils advocate however I have as I expect many others here do a magpies approach to books. Although I do hope that some time there will come a time for seamless reading, a good start for me is 'safari books online' the only issue here is the portability of the text from the web.
|