Quote:
think that one of the things that many folks forget when comparing ebooks to paper books is that when you buy a paper book you buy one copy.
If you resell or give away a paper book you are only doing so with a single copy.
|
True, but if you give it to a library, for instance, you are giving away unlimited opportunities for 'free' reading, with no payment for all those further readings.
Quote:
Ebooks, by their very nature, can easily be perfectly copied and so it is possible to not only give away or resell multiple perfect copies of a book, but also to keep a copy for yourself.
When you buy a paper book if you make good quality copies of that paper book and resell those copies it is illegal.
|
Just a thought; this really is how books got started, as we know. Painstaking copying of existing material, through the ages down to the monks making illuminated manuscripts. And then the printing press came into being, and the whole wonderful explosion of information became gigantic. But even then there was no copyright; if you saw a pamplet or a broadside you liked or agreed with you passed it along to other people, and those people passed it along....
Not that I don't agree with copyright. I do. But I think this subject has a lot of gray areas.