Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
My question is not whether they are or are not doing it (clearly some are based on your information) but what would be the benefit to them to specifically limit this right to share or sell books in the same manner as pbooks? I can't see any. If you can please point it out. I refuse to believe that they would just do it for malice, corporations don't do that, the are driven by the bottom line.
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And my question is, why aren't they all allowing it? Why do they think it's reasonable to limit how ebooks can be loaned, now that the tech makes it possible? Why did B&N set the "loaning" to one time, two weeks, instead of "as long as you like" and "as many times as you like?"
Adobe can authorize a new device, and un-authorize an old one--why can't their servers shift DRM ownership of a particular ebook to a new device, instead of an entire account at once? Why didn't publishers insist on *that* programming, instead of a new DRM method only usable on a few readers?
They're not doing it for "malice." They're doing it for *greed*--they don't want to allow a secondhand market for ebooks, neither free or sold. They have the technology to make it difficult to hand off an ebook to a friend when you're done, so they implement that, regardless of the consumer's right to resell what they've bought.
Publishers have convinced themselves that it's wrong to transfer ownership of ebooks, that an ebook is not like a physical book, but more like a single-person license to access content. Every action they take supports this claim. However, US legal rulings disagree; their economic model treats ebooks as sales, therefore they are legally sales.