The 'ebooks are not transferable' issue...

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

In the case of e-books, you know what you are buying, and you are told the stipulations of that sale. No court would overturn that unless the stipulations were intentionally concealed in order to convince you to buy.

What you are overlooking is that the stipulations themselves are not binding, to the extent that they are contrary to public policy, or in situations where the contract is non-negotiable and the stipulations are manifestly unfair. And in my view, that is most of the time, certainly when we are talking about outfits like Amazon.

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

Anyway, I don't want to argue the present legalities. I merely state that the laws as they stand should be amended to more accurately reflect the product in question, instead of being taken in whole cloth from another product type which is in fact not the same. The fact that there is so much legal ambiguity is a direct consequence of improperly applying laws from one product onto another inherently different product.

The legal ambiguities have roots that go much deeper than you might think, because of the First Amendment. Basically, that Amendment means that products which would seem to be wildly different from each other - music, books, computer programs, movies - are all the same from the perspective of what contractual arrangements - and laws - are Constitutionally permissible.

Writers tend to think of the First Amendment and copyright as acting in tandem, protecting what they write, which is true enough. But they also protect what readers can read and how they can use previously created material. Up until we hit the electronic environment, we had achieved a balance of rights that were largely dictated by the costs of production & distribution.

These used to set up practical limits on what readers and other users of creative material could do with it once we bought it - we didn't use to be able to copy stuff very easily, nor could we print it. The balance in the paper based environment favored the sellers over the readers.

But in the electronic environment, those practical limits have disappeared. It seems to me that the previous contractual arrangements concerning books, in the paper environment, predicated on the production & distribution practicalities, are not sustainable in the electronic environment. Any new contractual arrangements might be less favorable to sellers than the old ones.

And that could explain why it is really the sellers, more than the readers, who are trying to sustain the old system of contractual arrangements.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Yes, but the minute you register and sync your iPod they will all get erased unless you also have copies of them. And there is no easy way to get them off the device in a usable form.

Well, that just affects the price you can get. I'll take your word about how easy it isn't!

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

And how would the buyer read the book if it's drm'ed?

When people on the dark side argue that ebooks should be priced close to print because content is all that matters, this thread should be used to remind them that a physical book comes not only with the content but with inherent rights that simply do not exist in ebooks and those rights are worth a lot for me and again I bet lots of others. Those rights, not only the paper and the package.

That's the conundrum, isn't it? Do you try to get the full rights you are paying for, or are you willing to accept lesser rights for a lesser price? It can be argued both ways, and when the dust settles, we might see some kind of tiered system, where the same ebook is priced at different levels depending on the bundle of rights you get.

And oh yes, as someone pointed out earlier, instant delivery of the book is a nice new right that is worth paying for!

[dragonbone]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I thought there were plenty of apps available to do just that, copy the songs off the ipod to your hard drive without having to use itunes. I seem to remember using them in the past on my 5.5g ipod. Not had the need to yet on my iTouch, but I'm sure there must be some about.

EDIT: Took a couple of minutes and found countless hits for both Windows and Mac (didn't check Linux) to copy music from the iTouch to the computer HD without having to re-register and have music wiped out by iTunes.

Yes, I have one and it's called Media Widget .

[Liviu_5]

Originally Posted by Harmon

That's the conundrum, isn't it? Do you try to get the full rights you are paying for, or are you willing to accept lesser rights for a lesser price? It can be argued both ways, and when the dust settles, we might see some kind of tiered system, where the same ebook is priced at different levels depending on the bundle of rights you get.

And oh yes, as someone pointed out earlier, instant delivery of the book is a nice new right that is worth paying for!

About the tier system - I kind of doubt it will happen, being a bit too complicated, such systems usually revert to the lowest common denominator - see for print books how the issue of a mmpb immediately drives the hardcover in the remainder bin, with several exceptions like high popularity books, or collector/library editions, but even those are dwarfed numerically by the corresponding mmpb.

I would think more of a reverse auction, with higher prices for immediacy, dropping in time

And I agree about advantages of ebooks - I would not call them "rights" - in instant delivery, ability to change fonts, no physical space taken, many ebooks on a device- there are others like search, hyperlinks... that are less useful for me overall

It all depends - but my original point is that I rarely see a "nuanced" discussion of advantages, disadvantages, what we as customers should expect/demand...

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Liviu_5

About the tier system - I kind of doubt it will happen, being a bit too complicated, such systems usually revert to the lowest common denominator - see for print books how the issue of a mmpb immediately drives the hardcover in the remainder bin, with several exceptions like high popularity books, or collector/library editions, but even those are dwarfed numerically by the corresponding mmpb.

I would think more of a reverse auction, with higher prices for immediacy, dropping in time

And I agree about advantages of ebooks - I would not call them "rights" - in instant delivery, ability to change fonts, no physical space taken, many ebooks on a device- there are others like search, hyperlinks... that are less useful for me overall

It all depends - but my original point is that I rarely see a "nuanced" discussion of advantages, disadvantages, what we as customers should expect/demand...

A tier system might take the form of different sellers offering different plans, just as with music, rather than the same seller offering different plans.

It seems to me, for example, that a big ebook genre is romance novels, and I can imagine that they might be sold on a subscription basis, like the book of the month club.

I think you are right about the lack of nuanced discussions. We are all still thinking of ebooks as if they are the same thing as print books. But as Steve Jordan points out, they are really something different. At some point, a paradigm shift will probably occur - there was a time when novels were sold chapter by chapter, in magazine form. But now, we all think of Dickens as a writer of Fat Books, not serialized novels.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This is terrible advice. You absolutely CANNOT give away the books with an eBook reader, any more than you can give away the music you've bought from iTunes if you sell your iPod. In both cases, "ownership" of them is not transferrable.

I guess we've got an answer to the "give away music with your iPod" question.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...queen-an-ipod/