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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Charming. Agency prices for ebooks you can't (legitimately) download. Agency prices for a *viewing window*. Yeah, that'll go over real well.
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Considering that you will be able to read your books on almost any device that has a web browser (even when offline), and given that more and more data is moving into "the cloud," it might do OK.
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The big publishers are working *very very hard* to pretend that the internet isn't really going to change the business model they've been using for the last hundred years or so....
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Actually, it was Google that came up with this distribution and payment method, not the publishers. You sure this is an instance of publishers having their head in the sand?
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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
The lawsuits that challenge the whole ebooks-as-licenses concept are likely to come out of something like Googlebooks--not so much because customers are likely to insist "I bought property, not a usage license," but because some clever person playing tax games is likely to attempt to put license-purchases into a different tax bracket from property purchases.
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Yeah, I doubt it.
If you are a sole proprietor or a business, it doesn't really matter if you are renting or buying an ebook; it's an expense. I can't imagine that too many freelancers or businesses are really purchasing enough ebooks for the IRS to even notice it. Or to put it another way: If you're a sole proprietor and you list $1.5 million in ebook purchases as a business expense, the IRS
probably isn't going to ask you whether they were licensed or purchased when they audit you.
Also, the overwhelming majority of libraries in the US are municipal. There could be some accounting questions, but I don't think your city library has to pay federal taxes....