'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.
Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'
The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.
'I mentioned to Gabe that the LendMe feature didn't extend to all books, and he was surprised to learn this, as "lending" a book digitally removes it from your device. It is, in many ways, like lending a person a real book. I suggested to him that this was precisely what they didn't like - you have to warp your mind to perceive it, to understand why a publisher of books would hate the book as a concept, but there you have it. They don't like that books are immutable, transferable objects whose payload never degrades. A digital "book" - caged on a device, licensed, not purchased - is the sort of thing that greases their mandibles with digestive enzymes.
Imagine what these people must think of libraries.'
The fact is that, scare-mongering aside, piracy doesn't seem to have nearly as big an impact on profits as the large content creators would have us believe. What worries me more is that they seem to be leveraging this fear campaign to chip away at the basic concept of "ownership," pushing for a world where products are "licensed" rather than "bought." This scares me because, being rather old-fashioned, I enjoy the concept of buying a book, rather than licensing the words in that book for reading.
[1]http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/12/16/