[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Gideon

Interesting.. one note. The question regarding sharing copies might be expanded a bit. I think there's a big difference in sharing in a universal sense (uploading to a torrent site, for instance) and giving your girlfriend a copy to read (just like you would a real book).

But yes, I'm interested in the results as well.

i hesitated also for that question ; in the end i answered no (it's not immoral) thinking of sharing a copy with friends / family. i hadn't read all the replies to this thread before answering and i wasn't sure what the intention was of the question (large-scale vs. small-scale) and i see no reason i shouldn't continue to share books with friends (once they get reading devices... ) just as i do with paper books. also i wonder how many people make a distinction between recent books (copyright holder still alive and active) and books which are still in copyright but whose author has been dead 50 or so years (dorothy sayers or agatha christie come to mind).

Originally Posted by djgreedo

Good point. I'll leave it as it simply because it would be unfair to change the question halfway through.

I already thought of a few extra questions, so maybe I'll do another one. A good question would be something along the lines of 'What degree of sharing of a digital file is acceptable to you?' - sharing with your household, uploading to the whole world, sharing among friends, etc.

another (expanded) survey could be interesting.

Originally Posted by lemon lime

I'm baffled that this did not get 100% Yes.

me too.

On question #9, I answered that my spending habits would not change. This is because I remove DRM from every DRMed ebook I buy. If they came up with a DRM that was impossible to remove, I would buy drastically fewer DRMed books.

me too. however until recently i might have answered differently, because i did not buy any epub books until the drm had been cracked, whereas now i do. so possibly my spending habits changed somewhat after that.

Originally Posted by pepak

Standardized format doesn't mean the best reading experience. To make full use of some features of a reader, a modified book may be necessary.

Also, you must consider the real world. In a perfect world a standard format might work (I am not so sure about that, but let's assume it would for the sake of discussion), but we must deal with real-world situation. Including abilities and inabilities of various readers to render certain formats in a certain way. If all books were to be available only in EPUB format, for example, my reading experience would be drastically lowered because Sony's renderer is sub-par as far as I am concerned.

The problem is that this question is actually two questions - whether all e-books should have a standardized format, and whether they all should work on all devices.

interesting point. but i think if we're supposing a situation where there is a standardized format (this is hypothetical) we can also suppose a significantly improved renderer for that format (without the flaws / shortcomings of sony's renderer, for instance). this is for the moment hypthetical but less so ; the epub renderer on the new bookeen opus, for instance, can display justified text (currently sony's can't, and many people hate this), and also if memory serves does not display the page numbers in the margin, which many people also hate. these are two significant improvements if we think of the most common complaints about the epub format. i think we can hope to see epub renderers very soon which can handle very advanced page layout (assuming the screen is large enough to properly display it) which could even be suitable for magazines, scientific articles (with equations), etc. so i answered this question with the idea that we are talking about an ideal situation on that level as well.