[LDBoblo]

Where I live, if you lend someone a book and they like it, they ask you how much it costs. If it is above the price of photocopying it, they will go and photocopy it instead. It's caused a bit of a ruckus here, and some of the more legitimate copy shops are now rejecting requests to photocopy many things. However, there are hundreds and hundreds of small shops that frankly don't care about what they copy, as long as they get paid for it.

In some cultures and/or subcultures, the idea of "buying it if I want to keep it" is considered noble and practiced by the majority, promoted by surrounding society. In other cultures, however, such ideals sound a bit ludicrous. Why spend $40usd for a book when you can get it for $5-10 at a cheap copy shop?

One of the main strongholds that publishers have been able to maintain is the relative inefficiency and inconvenience of reproducing their hardcopy materials, even including photocopiers. Digital formats make reproduction quite simple. I don't think it's surprising at all that many publishers are reluctant to put their materials out in electronic formats.

The library system introduces an interesting twist on ownership, one that no doubt is influencing some of the discourse on the future of electronic publishing. I have not used a public library in quite some years, but I was happily a member of a university with a broad library and inter-library loan programs, which put a lot of materials at convenient access. If I wanted to read a book, I could just go and check it out, granted they had it on the shelves. It was, for all practical purposes, free. I'd return it, and if I wanted to read it again, I'd go check it out again.

Carry this over to digital formats, and you get the obvious question: Why on earth would you bother? The purpose of returning the book is because it's a finite entity with limited durability and longevity. Not returning it would be denying others the chance to read it.

Amazing spirit, those libraries have. As far as I was concerned in my youth, I didn't need to buy the books as long as I could just get them from the library. Lucky me, since I was pretty poor.

When I was in high school...or rather not in high school because I was skipping classes as we degenerates were known for, I'd often go with a friend in a...erm borrowed car...to a bookstore some 100 km away (the nearest Barnes and Noble). Our local library was rather rubbish (and being spotted locally could cause problems with the school), and we could sit at the Barnes and Noble for hours, reading books that we'd never buy, or couldn't afford to buy. Sure, we bought some books every other time we went, but usually it was more for the reading experience there.

Can such open opportunities and spirit be maintained in digital format while not sacrificing publisher and author profits? Can they even exist on the internet? I think it's obvious that many companies have been staring at these concerns, but the think tanks have been stumbling trying to come up with feasible answers. The solutions we've seen so far involving proprietary formats, exclusivity, and licensing limitations, along with the gimmickry of "read a page or two before you decide to buy!", seem to be a band-aid on a broken leg--no, a band-aid on brain damage.

I still have problems seeing ebooks as tangible goods. With libraries, information itself was essentially free for the taking, and when I bought a book, I was paying for the book itself, not the information inside it. With digital books, I'm not getting anything physical, and I'm still paying tangible book prices for it. What a joke. A lot of companies seem to be afraid of this thinking too.

What to do? I'm no expert, so don't look at me. Paying book prices for licenses to view books though without any physical copy...a pretty rubbish concept.