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Originally Posted by Marcy
The answer to this is simple. Those other formats always had the obsolescence factor built in, being relatively new technologies, especially video games. People know when they buy these things that they might not work 3 or 5 years down the line.
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I guess, but wouldn't the precedent for video games be non-video games, e.g. Monopoly, decks of cards etc., which one could play for a lifetime or two?
Or: Any content that you access using an intermediary device (game console, turntable, VCR) runs the risk of becoming inaccessible due to obsolescence of that device. So which paradigm should we apply: "books are forever" or "we need a device to access ebooks" ?
Plus, lots of money is getting poured into games with a limited shelf life. In 2008, Americans spent about $23 billion on console games (just the games, not the hardware), and iirc around $32 billion on books. Normally I'd assume that if you're spending that much money on a product, you'd expect it to be useable more than a few years. (Then again, that presumes that humans act in a rational fashion...
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Originally Posted by Marcy
Once I own a pbook I can do anything I want with it. I can read it a bazillion times or just once. I can even *gasp* lend it to a friend who then gets to read it for free. If the author changes publishers or the book goes out of print, my copy is still mine. Forever. In a non-DRM'ed and non-proprietary format. That's what I want and expect from my ebooks.
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Sure, but another way to think of it is that books, as a physical medium, have a sort of "rights management" by virtue of the nature of the object itself.
When I purchase a book, I get one copy and that's it. I can't make an unlimited number of duplicates at no cost; in fact, if I want to duplicate a book, its "analog" nature means I'm going expend a lot of resources (time, effort, money) for what is likely an inferior copy (photocopy, OCR'd copy). I can loan the book out indefinitely, but the physical nature of the book ensures I can't read it when I do so, nor can I share it instantaneously and at no cost to millions of my best new Internet pals. I can sell the book, but selling that physical object guarantees I can't access it after it's sold (assuming I haven't made a low-fi or exceptionally arduous digital copy first). And while paper book piracy is possible, it's more difficult and less common than the digital varieties (both with and without profit motives), as a pirated paper book is going to take resources to make, and will be hard to distribute (whereas digital is cheap and easy).
In other words, the physical book has plenty of restrictions. The sets of "physical restrictions" and "digital restrictions" are not identical, so we are profoundly jarred by what we lose, and in typical human fashion notice the losses far more than (even with DRM) the gains. And we are just so used to a paper book's restrictions that we don't even think of the situation that way.