Quote:
Originally Posted by bbusybookworm
I'll say they may be taking off, but its still going to take some more time to become a little more mainstream.
Outside the US, Buying and loading content is still a pain and abit of a hit and miss. Geo Restrictions and DRM mean that people who may like to switch to Ebooks, or move completely to it can not and it does't look like it will in th near future.
As a personal example, I went looking for 8 books this week, books I heard about, or was told were intrestion. I immediately went to FW, BoB, etc to check whether they were available.
Out of those 8, only two were available as e-books. Of those two one was the same price as the HB, and the other mre then double the price Paperback. As such, While I bought one book, if more had been available, at comparable (I'm not even asking for Lower) Prices I'll probably have bought more. Now, I've forgotton, most of those names, so that even if they becoma available in the future, I'm probably not going to get them.
Untill Availability and pricing get in line, eBooks are not going to gain the meteoric rise we'll like to see.
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We know that publishers are responsible for most of these restrictions. But do not forget the governments of most European countries. They want to collect 19% on all internet purchases and how can they do that if Europeans just download from the US, tax free? And in Germany, for example, you even have government mandated price fixing for books. So there definitely is more to this problem. Time for all those Europeans to write to their representatives!