Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Yep. They're looking at ebooks as a way to enforce "one purchase = one user." And for the most part, upper-class/wealthy people accept that as reasonable, and students and lower-class communities, who have always survived with a lot of sharing and resales, have outright rejected it.
Which is what happened with music & video games: the biggest market demographic utterly rejects the idea of one sale meaning one user, and the publishers had no plan in place to deal with anything else.
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One would think that they would be looking to go to a rental model for ebooks, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the pbook sale model. The dichotomy seems to me to be a natural one: if you want to own a book, buy the pbook. If you just want to read it, rent the ebook.
It strikes me that the pricing & timing confusion that is going on right now is actually a distortion reflecting the underlying economic reality of that natural dichotomy.