Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Amazon, Sony, Barnes and Noble and other companies try very, *very* hard to pretend that they are selling the book, but in fact you are paying for license to read the book for limited time.
|
Incorrect.
While we might be able to characterize the situation as a license, there is no time limit. The only way your books will "expire" is if the company goes bankrupt, or otherwise completely abandons the format without offering readers any form of upgrade option.
If you buy a VCR tape today, and tomorrow it becomes nearly impossible to buy a VCR player that is compatible with your home entertainment system, that does not indicate that you only "licensed" the tape with a "limited" duration.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by kacir
Let me quote BoinbBoing.net, that is quoting Jef Bezos....
|
Note that it is some unknown person on BoingBoing that characterizes ebooks as a "small subset of rights." While I do agree that current ebook implementations do restrict certain rights, it does not restrict others (e.g. quoting for fair use; you'd just have to type it manually, rather than cut & paste from the ebook) and even adds others (e.g. you can't back up your paper books to CD or Mozy for safe keeping; instant free delivery; reading across multiple devices; on some platforms, text-to-speech capabilities etc). In some cases, you can even check out an ebook from the library without physically going there.
I.e. people get up in arms over lost abilities, but for some odd reason never include the new abilities in their outrage or calculus. H'm....
I concur the situation is very different between paper books and ebooks -- as one might expect with a change in medium. However, it still doesn't equate purchasing an ebook with a digital movie rental that only lasts 24 hours.