Nothing has really changed

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

Ya know, I've never seen the purpose of geographical restrictions on books. As an author, I want my books to show up everywhere possible. Yet it seems like the big presses don't care how many, or how few eyes hit paper. They just want their little power trips. Supposedly it's to control prices regionally, which they claim to have the power to do right now with paper books, but I think it's a lot more.

It's more so that you can sell the same book to different publishers in different countries. But having said that, JF Gonzalez books published worldwide by Leisure are not available in the UK legally in any format other than Amazon's Topaz (which isn't worth having and is a pain to convert). In America you can get them in epub from lots of sites.

[taming]

I don't know whether you wrote in favour or not of the bill as it stands, but it's a lot less beneficial than it looks on the surface, with a clause that effectively invalidates the DRM-removal thing by then making it illegal to remove said "digital locks" on anything that has them, because the presence of digital locks will be considered to trump fair use.

Definitely NOT in favour of the bill as it stands, but it appears that the removal of digital locks for personal use will end up in the final bill. That is unless it gets lost in the brouhaha about the iPOD tax <groan>. I am, btw, a huge fan of Michael Geist.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by taming

Definitely NOT in favour of the bill as it stands, but it appears that the removal of digital locks for personal use will end up in the final bill.

Oh, good, that's a relief. I was starting to get worried that even issue-savvy people might have been getting taken in by the buzzword-pushing insistence that it was all a Good Thing™, pay no attention to the pit trap in the next corridor.

I've looked at some of the proposed amendments, and while they're an improvement if they really do get incorporated (the track record of our current governing party's cooperativeness and reasonability does not give me hope), I still think it's pretty iffy.

Maybe it might be better to let things continue to stand in limbo for a while longer until someone comes up with a better proposal that has more end-user practicality thought and less corporation-favouring control agenda to it.

[OtterBooks]

You know what's outrageous? The price of coffee pods for my $200 Tassimo single serve coffee machine. Not only is the coffee for it overpriced, I have no choice but to use their licensed coffee-disc technology. Friggin' $21 for 16 discs! How much can it cost to produce little pieces of paper with coffee grounds inside? I may have no choice but to shoplift them. You do what you gotta do when you find yourself beneath the heel of corporate oppression. *raises double-foam cinnamon latte in protest*

[Worldwalker]

Nice straw man. Sorry about that torch thing....

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

You know what's outrageous? The price of coffee pods for my $200 Tassimo single serve coffee machine. Not only is the coffee for it overpriced, I have no choice but to use their licensed coffee-disc technology. Friggin' $21 for 16 discs! How much can it cost to produce little pieces of paper with coffee grounds inside? I may have no choice but to shoplift them. You do what you gotta do when you find yourself beneath the heel of corporate oppression. *raises double-foam cinnamon latte in protest*

And did you look at the latest Ferrari prices? Those profit margins are really outrageous, shouldn't that give me the moral right to steal one off the lot? Serves them right for not selling me one for 25 K.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by taming

I’m sure that there were many times I could have slipped a book I wanted into my coat pocket and gotten away with it. Other people did it all the time.

I didn’t do it then, and I won’t do the equivalent now. I buy my books, use my library card, and I wait.

If you slipped a book in your pocket back then, the store would be out whatever it paid for the book, and not get a chance to sell it to someone else. If you download a book from a torrent, you didn't make that one unsellable, and nobody is out the cost of producing that copy.

And if you waited, and bought a paper book, you could hand it to your friend when you were done, and another when he was done with it. You could give it to your nephew to give to a friend of his at school. You could sell it back to a store at 1/4 cover price and they might put it on the shelf at 1/2 cover price.

Until ebook publishers figure out how to allow these actions for ebooks, I'm not going to be overly concerned with extra copies floating around. If you can't loan it or resell it--can't share it--it's not a book, it's "digital content," and there's no moral superiority in finding a sharable version.

(There's an immorality in not paying the creators, which includes author and publisher, for their work. But if you've done that, there's no ethical reason to pay them multiple times for variants of the same work.)

I'm wondering how long it'll take for decent virtual terminal program to get popular, so people can load their own purchased, DRM'd ebooks and allow other people to have remote access to their computers and read them.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

You know what's outrageous? The price of coffee pods for my $200 Tassimo single serve coffee machine. Not only is the coffee for it overpriced, I have no choice but to use their licensed coffee-disc technology.

Plus, there's no good way to strip the DRM from Keurig K-Cups and use them instead!

[OtterBooks]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Plus, there's no good way to strip the DRM from Keurig K-Cups and use them instead!

Under First-Brew rights I should be allowed to do so, but the Tassimo only reads pods infected with the proprietary bar codes that inform the machine when to add a dash of chicory.

[caleb72]

To me geographic restrictions is like artificially trying to protect an old model put under pressure by emergency of the newer global marketplace. And it's not even managing that in any consistent way.

To me it seems utterly ridiculous that we would create a global marketplace and then cripple it by insisting on regionalising sales.

What I've never understood though is that this old model existed with the paper book medium and was the first thing to be theoretically blown away by the creation of the global marketplace. In Australia we already have unrestricted access to books from the UK and the US through online retailers. Amazon and others do not try to determine which region you reside in and will happily ship the books you've chosen anywhere you nominate. So regional publishing rights are already meaningless as far as the consumer is concerned.

Now, a newer medium (or a repurposed medium) comes along after the wrecking ball has already made light work of regional publishing rights at paper level. It's at this point that suddenly there's an attempt to protect these rights.

If I can not get ebooks in Australia due to regional restrictions, I may well resort to buying paper books. However, one thing is for certain, I won't be rewarding local publishers with that decision, I will be purchasing from Booktopia or Amazon.

You can't hold back the tide - it's never been a very successful business philosophy. Adapt or die is probably a better one.

Regards
Caleb

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

How do you do that, and how long does it usually take?

It's not something that I've done all that often.
On one occasion it took a couple of months.

Smaller libraries cannot hope to have the fullest range of books that are available, so the larger libraries help out. In the older days, of course, the requests would go out snail-mail - presumably the process of requesting is quicker now we are in the electronic age....It's years since I last dropped into a library .....

[DMB]

It's possible that we're at a transitional stage from dead-tree books being the norm to ebooks being the norm. I think the transition may take a surprisingly long time because although we have canned music as a comparison, it's not all that close an analogy.

I think that as the e-market expands a lot of the nonsense is going to have to get chucked out -- geographic restrictions, single mutually incomprehensible formats, possibly DRM; and a lot more flexibility is going to come in, whether the industry wants it now or not.

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

And did you look at the latest Ferrari prices? Those profit margins are really outrageous, shouldn't that give me the moral right to steal one off the lot? Serves them right for not selling me one for 25 K.

What sort of modem will you be using for that then?

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by caleb72

What I've never understood though is that this old model existed with the paper book medium and was the first thing to be theoretically blown away by the creation of the global marketplace. In Australia we already have unrestricted access to books from the UK and the US through online retailers. Amazon and others do not try to determine which region you reside in and will happily ship the books you've chosen anywhere you nominate. So regional publishing rights are already meaningless as far as the consumer is concerned.

...

If I can not get ebooks in Australia due to regional restrictions, I may well resort to buying paper books. However, one thing is for certain, I won't be rewarding local publishers with that decision, I will be purchasing from Booktopia or Amazon.

You can't hold back the tide - it's never been a very successful business philosophy. Adapt or die is probably a better one.

Regards
Caleb

Caleb, you should actually be looking at The Book Depository first. Free shipping!

And two options, the uk and the usa site - have different prices, so check for the cheapest.

The usa one tends to be cheaper at the moment, given the parity exchange rate.

http://www.bookdepository.com

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/

[Fayth]

Originally Posted by taming

I am not, by any means, saying that we should not advocate for the removal of barriers like geographic restrictions and DRM. I think we should be writing to Publishers, our elected representatives, and voting with our wallet. Currently there is a bill before the Canadian Parliament (Bill C-32) that probably will, when finally passed, allow the removal of digital locks (DRM) for personal use. I have written to my MP, people on the committee looking at that, and to others. Now that International ebook rights are on the agenda for most Publishers, I'm hopeful that geographic restrictions will be a temporary (albeit very annoying) thing.

I just do not feel that the addition of eBooks to my available choices gives me some sort of right to have everything I want immediately (and for free) just because there are places online where I can get these things in that way.

Funny you should mention that, because I've been emailing a bunch of people since I got my ereader. Various publishers about ebook availability and my MP about full HST being charged on Ebooks and not on physical books.

(There's an immorality in not paying the creators, which includes author and publisher, for their work. But if you've done that, there's no ethical reason to pay them multiple times for variants of the same work.)

I don't know about that. If I have the hardcover version of a book, but want the paperback when it comes out, I can't just go to the store and pay them the cost of the paper and say "i already bought the material". It is the same here. I bought my first 100 fantasy books as physical books, i'm not entitled to torrent them as ebooks simply because I bought them before.