iLiad Firmware with long-awaited Mobipocket Reader (almost)

Originally Posted by vampyre

The music industry was slow enough to wise up, this is painful.

Biggest reason for the music industry changing but publishing not? I can rip a CD, normalize it, get it tagged and loaded onto a player in under 5 minutes and so I do. Doesn't really matter what they tell me I can and can't do with it. If they don't want me to rip then they need to sell it to me in a format I want to buy and not just what they want to sell.

Books.....ah, books are a different beast. Even if you were to unbind the pages and run it through a duplex scanner and OCR you would still have to do a lot of work by hand to get it looking nice electronically (not to mention that you just destroyed the actual book). I'm guessing this would take a bit longer than 5 minutes. Quite a bit more actually. So most people won't do it.

So to compare: a couple hours to change format on 25 CDs versus the entire evening to move an average book to digital (not to mention any editing you do later because you missed something during your initial proofreading).

If publishing is going to change it will probably not be due to the consumers changing what was sold into what was wanted (like it was with music) but due to another business model taking part of their market share by providing a better service than they want to do.

[vampyre]

@stxopher
Absolutely agree but it makes me want to stab the publishing house's representatives when they whine (oh they practically weep) about why paper books must be so expensive ie because they get passed along and shared instead of everyone buying their own copy. It's their pompous ignorance that gets me. We can hope some miracle will happen as you said and a consumer driven change will take place.