If I - as a newcomer here - might make a couple of points? (AKA rambles...)
It seems to me that the question is basically how one wishes to - to use the modern idiom - consume one's media. (I hate that phrase).
I own perhaps four or five thousand books. I buy - currently - around fifty or a hundred a year, almost all new, but the collection goes back in rare cases to the sixteen hundreds and in a large proportion to the first quarter or half of the last century.
When I buy a book, I am buying the thoughts of the author, and I am buying a physical product which I can keep, burn (heresy!), lend, or give away. As a result of that purchase, the author (hopefully) gets some money, the retailer gets rather more, and the publisher likely gets most of all. Which is fair enough; the retailer has to pay for bricks and mortar (even in the case of someone like Amazon) and the publisher takes the risk that I won't buy the book in the first place.
However, when I buy an ebook, what am I getting? In my opinion, if it's not in a form which can be easily transcribed to other formats, so it can be displayed without issue on *any* viewer I happen to own now or in the future, then it's nothing more than an ephemera.
Any technology which prohibits how I may use, or store, or modify material is basically assuming that I am a criminal before. The presumption of innocence unless proven guilty may still inform a court of law, but it certainly doesn't appear to hold in the case of a retailer. If a product is available only with some form of DRM infection, I will not purchase it - with a single provisio I will discuss later.
As it happens, many of the books I own are increasingly fragile - consider an eighty-year collection of science-fiction magazines, printed on pulp paper. Copyright law in the UK does not allow me to copy them - full stop. There is no 'fair use' term - see paragraphs seven and eight here:
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/co..._copyright_law - and indeed there is a blanket prohibition:
Quote:
It is an offence to perform any of the following acts without the consent of the owner:
Copy the work.
...
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and on top of that, copyright is vested generally for seventy years after the death of the author(s).
So there's no way it's legal for me to scan, OCR, proofread, and format the vast majority of those books. But I intend to continue doing so - since many of them are unobtainable as replacements and suffer irreparable damage simply from being read (pulp paper from the twenties and thirties is often so fragile now that turning a page can crumble it; glue used in paperback spines from the seventies and eighties (or later!) cracks simply from opening the book).
Before you ask: these are not for distribution. These are for *me*, not for anyone else. They will not appear in anyone else's ebook readers, nor be available from any download site. Nor will I dispose of the original book; if I do, then it is incumbent on me to dispose also of the electronic copies. (I operate a similar policy with CDs).
A question arises: is it moral for me to download a scan of a book of which I already own a paper copy? I am torn between the saving of the effort of scanning, and the implicit support of a pirate site - and I don't yet have a definitive answer.
A second question: with a new book, I see no reason why I should pay (as a book purchaser) a price equivalent to a paper copy for an electronic version, particularly if I already own a paper version. If the author were to get a bigger cut, perhaps, but there is no bricks and mortar retailer to take his cut, and there is no issue of sale or return, and there is *no physical product* - the cost of delivering a high-speed data line to a server centre is a damn sight less than shipping paper around a country. An electronic book needs to pay the author and the editor, and a modicum of profit for the publisher - but I suspect that publishers are keen to increase their profits to exorbitant levels.
A thought: this is a situation where DRM *might* just be acceptable. One registers an ID with a publisher (or indeed, this could be cross-publisher) which need contain nothing more than a valid encryption key - perhaps on a token. When one purchases a paper copy of a book, one receives a voucher allowing the further purchase - at a very low price, under a pound, at most - of an electronic version. Your token and the voucher authorise the sale...
Sorry, I've rambled too long.
One last thing though: I'm currently working on a master's thesis looking at ways to improve the fidelity of scanned texts after the OCR process has finished with them - identifying and correcting common errors of spelling, syntax, and semantics. The aim is to produce a system which will output a much cleaner copy of a scanned text without reference to the scanned images. While the main aim of this is for my own use, it is ideal for someone like googlebooks or gutenberg (or similar) or indeed any organisation with a quantity of paper documents that must be both preserved and computer-searchable. It will also make life simpler for pirates - does that make me a pirate?
Neil