Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
If I was an author, I would want to prevent tampering because it is the only way I can assure consumers that they are getting the authentic product.
On another forum there was a discussion about ebooks vs. pbooks, and I was one of the few, if perhaps the only one, who believed that ebooks will come to dominate fiction but not scholarly work, at least for the foreseeable future, precisely because of the problems of vetting of authors and authenticity/accuracy of the text. Although I don't rely on fiction for anything more than entertainment, I do rely on scholarly works to expand my knowledge. It is in this ara that there is a need for the vetting process that scholarly publishers provide and for the pbook's (at least in today's world) assurance that I am getting what the author wrote and not what some unknown file manipulator wrote.
I suspect that fiction authors also take pride in their authorship and would be distressed to learn that their labor has been thwarted by some viral reader who manipulated their text and changed the story.
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We've had file checksums for a very, very long time. In fact, knowing that you can produce the checksum and compare it to the publisher provided one (which could in turn be explicitly authenticated with public key cryptography) makes electronic publishing
much more secure than p-books if needed.
Anyone can replace a page in a p-book, as Harry said. Or even the whole book. You'd be none the wiser.