Why ebooks are bad for you

[pidgeon92]

Bah.

[ebusinesstutor]

Better ways to support authors, he suggests, would be "to distribute tax funds to authors based on the cube root of each author's popularity"

The writer lost all credibility with me at this part.

Why don't people get it? Tax money is just our money collected by the government and redistributed. So for this to work, we either need another tax for books or we need to take existing tax money away from something else like schools, health care, etc. to pay authors like Stephen King.

Our existing system is better in that Stephen King fans pay him directly.

[Caleb666]

Originally Posted by jbcohen

After reading this article I must admit that Mr. Stillman has no idea what he is talking about and is another example how idiots frequently pass themselves off as experts. What Mr. Stillman fails to understand is the DRM and formats are simple innocnviences for electronic book readers. A reader with average intelligence, something that Mr. Stillman clearly does not have, can easily eliminate the DRM and change the format to what ever he/she wants. A dear friend of mine bought himself a Kobo, buys books from Amazon, uses Calibre to strip out the DRM and change the format to epub then he uplaods it to his Kobo. "It takes me approximatly five minutes" he says.

I'm sorry, but the fact that people are able to circumvent some DRM measures, doesn't mean that everything is alright. It's not certain that there will ALWAYS be a way to circumvent DRM, and what is certainly obvious is that many "regular" non-techy people don't know anything about this.

[Quexos]

Don't mean to throw salt in the pastry but the points made in that article only help make the case for piracy. All those anti-freedom restrictions not only have no grip for those that download from the so called "darknet" but also make them wonder even harder about ever considering purchasing digital material. And it's all free for them to boot. So I'd say the industry is either shooting themselves in the foot for some weird reason, on purpose or there are other interests that are at stake for the industry that we don't know about.

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

Yes, the big advantage of paper books, for which we should eschew ebooks, is that you can pay cash for them and no one knows you bought the book! Of course you'll want to wear a disguise at the cash register because of those security cameras. You never know when Homeland Security will swoop down and arrest everyone buying Fahrenheit 451.

The so called land of the free will never cease to amaze me (or to horrify me) ... but I digress, sorry.