[petermillard]

Hi

Originally Posted by Kilarney

I wouldn't, for a couple of reasons:
1) An E-book reader costs money. Your eyeballs don't. I'd want to recoup some of the cost of a reader, so paying full-price for an ebook would not entice me to buy a reader. (Not that the publisher cares.)

Fair enough, but if you carry that logic along, then should you expect Microsoft to sell you a copy of Office at a discount just because you've already bought a PC from Dell to run it on?

If you want to read eBooks, you have to have a reader of some kind; as Steve Jordan says above, this doesn't have to be a dedicated reader, but somewhere along the line you have to jump in and buy the hardware; to expect discounted books from a publisher just because you've bought the hardware to read them on from a third party, is a little optomistic IMHO. Your "not that the publisher cares" comment sums it up nicely, I think.

Seriously, if there's a book you want to read now and it's only available in a certain format, your choice is to pay the price, or not read it (ok, there's borrowing from friends or libraries, but we're talking about purchases here, right?) - would you really not read something you want to, just because the price was too high?

2) A tangible book is mine to keep. I can pass it on to my kids someday. I can go back and reread it 50 years from now. A DRMed ebook is essentially a lease. Therefore, it is worth less to me.

Well, I wasn't referring specifically to DRMd books, and yes, I agree, I also like the sense of ownership of a physical product. As for DRM being a lease, I'm not so sure - I really haven't studied mobipocket's EULA; perhaps I should!

Certainly with music, you may buy a physical CD and own it, but with regards to the music it contains you are only buying the right to listen to it. I don't know about other countries, but here in the UK those rights are also only for personal use; you can't legally play a CD you 'own' at your place of work. Software too, of course, is only a 'license to use'; are DRMd eBooks only a 'license to read' or do they simply tie a downloaded book to a specific reader or (group of) readers, much like iTunes Music Store downloads?

And bearing all this in mind, it's really no surprise that publishers (and the ones I've come across professionally aspire to being mired in the 19th century, if indeed they had any aspirations) are dragging their feet. It needs a real shake-up from a company that could do the hardware and the content; any takers??

Cheers, Pete.