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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
This is an out and out lie. It cannot be described as anything else.
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Well, I do not want to get involved in any personal attacks, mutual trolling accusations etc., so don't take this personally, but I think you didn't get Braver's meaning right. What he said was:
Quote:
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avoiding the key fact that Amazon, B&N and small web publishers for the first time in history do have the way to prove physical purchases, upgrade to ebooks, and do it in an economical way
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- so I don't think he meant that Amazon et consortes are absolute innovators in the realm of ebooks, but just that they have the infrastructure that allows them to consolidate the physical book purchases and subsequent ebook purchases. In other words, even if previously ebook providers could have given the option to upgrade pbooks to ebooks, they would have the following problems:
- It would be either impossible or extremely complicated (as they hadn't sold you the pbook beforehand)
- It would not be viable from the economical point of view
- They offered a rather limited selection of books, so even if they could offer an upgrade, the chance that they actually have the book that you wish to upgrade would be far smaller than with Amazon or B&N.
Incidentally, I've noticed that Mobipocket actually gives you some sort of automatical ebook upgrade (not from pbook to ebook, but from previous version of ebook to a new one). This happened to me with Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English; originally I bought the 3rd edition and now when I downloaded this dictionary again (because I upgraded my computer), I was quite pleasantly surprised to see that it's the 5th edition.