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View Poll Results: Could the Kindle spark book piracy? | |||
Yes, book piracy will get a boost thanks to successful Kindle sales | 26 | 20.16% | |
On the contrary, since it's now even easier and cheaper to purchase e-books | 46 | 35.66% | |
No, there won't be any change. | 57 | 44.19% | |
Voters: 129. You may not vote on this poll |
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12-07-2007, 09:11 AM | #61 | |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use |
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12-07-2007, 09:30 AM | #62 | |
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There was no e-book version at the time I purchased the paper version. I might have considered buying it, even though it is published in a DRM'd .pdf format. Thanks to the "pirates," I can now grab a copy in .chm, which is easy to put on a reader. I am a paying customer, but all thye publisher has done is make things difficult and expensive for me, and forces me to deal with a crappy DRM scheme if I want to legally purchase their e-book. No wonder the ebook market is thriving..... Now, I AM being required to repurchase the book if I want to have it in an e-format. Force me to do so? No, of course not. But, since I already own the p-book, at least according to US law, I CAN legally have an e-book format- what the heck is the difference whether I scan it in myself or download it from the net? Like a music cd- if I own it, I can have it in mp3 format. And ethically, I think I am justified also. Look at it this way- if I was a bad guy, a horrible "ebook pirate," I would have just grabbed an un-DRMd pirate copy of the book, period. No cash in for the publisher. As it stands, the publisher already got my $70- no way am I going to be a sap and send him $50 more. If that's what he expects, he will lose my business altogether. |
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12-07-2007, 09:52 AM | #63 | |
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Furthermore, I am very surprised that no one mentions library services in these discussions- like Safari from O'Reilly. I have belonged to several of these over the years and- if I wanted- could have copied all of the books they have. Aren't these a huige source for piracy? When one considers digital media, given the fact that it costs nothing to produce a new copy, some of the old economic rules have to be reconsidered. It seems that producers want to keep only the old rules that benefit them. For example, the customer must pay almost paper book prices for the e-book, but he does not have the right to return or resell the e-book. The reality of the digital marketplace is that you have sunk costs (the costs required to actually produce the work) and you have extremely minimal dfistribution costs- you don't have to buy paper and ink, etc. You aren't offering a tangible physical product, so your prices should go down. But greed steps in at this point, and the publisher thinks- hey, I can increase profit per copy sold tremewndously, because I have just eliminated raw resource cost, transportation cost, etc. The reality of this situation is that market forces will drive prices down and, in the end, publishers distributing electronically will probably make about the same amount per work as they do under the old system. And hopefully books might get better as a result. Publishers should realize that, with today's digital technology, the ONLY real function they serve is as a filtering mechanism- to keep the real crap off of our electronic bookshelves. I think we'll see more authors going off on their own, sans publisher, once they are established in the e-market.... |
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12-07-2007, 09:56 AM | #64 | ||||
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12-07-2007, 10:04 AM | #65 | |
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You can't expect a publisher to lower the price of e-Book because it has no resale value, however. The publisher doesn't receive back any of the value, after all, when the paper book is resold. I agree with you - it would be very nice, with books like this, if the publisher were to allow purchasers of the pBook to download the eBook for a nominal sum. Many of the programming books I've bought lately have come with a CD containing an eBook version included with the pBook. |
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12-07-2007, 10:05 AM | #66 | |||
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Just because it's easy, doesn't make it right, or "justified." What part of this isn't sinking in? |
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12-07-2007, 10:07 AM | #67 | |
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Any argument denoting such is fallacious because substituting one file with the other leaves you with the same result- you possess the same file. No, what we should be looking at here is a licensing issue. |
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12-07-2007, 10:16 AM | #68 | |
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We are talking licensing here- if I own a paper book, I have already paid for the content. If I can rip a music cd, seems I should be able to rip a book. And if I rip a book thjat I own and my file cannot be distinguished from a "pirated" file available on the net, well, has any wrongdoinmg been committed? If publisher's think most consumers are going to buy separate copies of books so they can be read on their readers, they are wrong. What's the next step in restrictive licensing- buying 2 paper copies of the book, so that one can be read on days Mon-Fri, and the other only on the weekends? The key factor here is that an ebook costs almost ZERO to produce- why should people have to pay for ebook content that they have already paid one time for? |
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12-07-2007, 10:19 AM | #69 |
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You're still using semantics to cloud the issue. Identicality isn't the issue. I can hold a paperback in one hand, and an identical paperback in the other hand, but if one was stolen, or created by someone who didn't own the content, that one is "illegal," and all appropriate laws apply.
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12-07-2007, 10:26 AM | #70 | ||
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To use an analogy, there's a big "black market" in the UK with people buying alcohol and cigarettes from France, where the taxes on these particular goods are much lower than here in the UK, and then re-selling them here. If I buy a bottle of Bell's whisky that someone has brought from France then I'm breaking the law in buying a bottle of whisky that hasn't had UK taxes paid on it. It doesn't matter that it's an identical bottle of whisky to the one that I could buy in my local supermarket and that, if I stood the two side by side, I couldn't tell which was which. One came from a legal source, the other from an illegal one. Quote:
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12-07-2007, 10:33 AM | #71 | |
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12-07-2007, 10:36 AM | #72 | |
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With a digital file, if I own a copy of the content in paper format, has anyone lost money no matter how I otained it? No, certainly not. If publishers want the ebook market to take off, they had better lighten up some. When I buy an ebook and lose the rights to resell and other rights that I have with a paper book, and I pay almost the same price for the ebook as for the pbook, well, it's not a very good deal. Look at all of the advantages the publisher is gaining- the ability to distribute books at almost zero cost (not including sunk costs required to produce the book), the ability to publish in multiple language markets at reduced costs, the ability to keep ALL of the titles he sells "in print," all the time. If e-books are going to sell well, the consumers want some perks too. We aren't talking physical objects, but rather "digital objects." If I bought a license to use M$ CrapOS 98, does it matter whether I load it onto a machine from the distro disk, or from a borrowed disk, or from a set of files across a network? No, it doesn't. |
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12-07-2007, 10:47 AM | #73 | |
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12-07-2007, 10:50 AM | #74 | |
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We're talking licensing here- if I own a copy of Windows OS, it is not so much that I own the physical distro disk as it is that I have paid for the right to use the software. I have licensed it. It doesn't matter if I install it from the original distro cd, or from an .iso image downloaded from the net, or from a friend's cd. MS doesn't care, as long as you bought that license. So why should book publishers? Ethics? I thionk the bigger factor here are market forces, and consumer demand. And these are working to force the price of information, whether ebooks or movies or music, down. It's a trend that won't stop. |
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12-07-2007, 10:55 AM | #75 | |
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Actually, I don't use mp3s, only lossless formats, but let's just assume for the case of argument. The traditional rules are changing, whether publishers like it or not. The big gain for the actual producers of content that I see is the potential to pull in vastly more income. If authors play their cards right, I think they can greatly reduce what the middlemen now keep for their own. |
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