Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamlet53
Perhaps another scenario both more and less hypothetical? In an entirely conceivable future where e-books represent 95%+ of the book selling market traditional publishing houses have all but disappeared and the major source for purchase of e-books is godzillamazon and a few other web outlets that function as book outlets.
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In an entirely conceivable future, cars will run on solar-powered electricity, and internal-combustion engines will be deemed a pollution hazard; should we start insisting that people do not drive cars on public streets right now?
WHEN OR IF ebooks become the dominant form of text-based information exchange, we can figure out what kinds of behaviors regarding them are ethical. Right now, ebooks are a niche market, fraught with weird technical issues and bizarre legal ones (geo restrictions, DRM, odd copyright notifications even on PD books), and publishers who want to survive after they are the dominant form will need to figure out how to make their customers happy with their products.
Most publishing houses are fighting very hard to *prevent* ebooks from overtaking pbooks. And they're doing a wonderfully effective job of it; digital music is
everywhere, while digital books are still rare, despite having been around longer. But while they're preventing a mainstream conversion to ebook as the standard form, they're encouraging an underground movement of techno-fanatics who are rapidly developing tools, both hardware & software, to deal with the eventual shift, without any corporate or even government oversight.
The big 6 publishing houses want to believe that they'll dominate the ebook market like they dominate the pbook one... but they're rapidly losing their window of opportunity to do so. And Godzillamazon isn't going to take over in their place--because it's trying too hard to meet the needs (or appease the fears) of those mainstream publishers, and that means *not* providing cheap, convenient ebooks. (TPZ means "not convenient," and the pricing ranges they've set up means "not cheap enough" in a lot of cases.)