

Lending e-books - zweiterlinde
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/10/steal_book

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delackner
Frankly I don't see any indications that the trajectory of electronic book
sales will go differently than music and movies. Same insanely anti-customer
pathological obsession with turning sales into "licenses," same obsession with
DRM, same outcome: the illegal edition is quite likely to become the more
consumer-friendly version.

Today people torrent individual albums and movies, or perhaps a trilogy, or a
collection of all the albums of a single band. Given the incredible efficiency
of text compression, it is entirely conceivable that soon people might be
faced with the decision to rent for $10 a non-shareable copy of a single book,
or to just download in one shot, "all books released electronically in
english, ever [mar 2011 edition]".

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flipbrad
The fact that you aren't buying the e-book, but instead paying the fee for a
very restrictive _licence_ , needs to be made much clearer to e-book users.

This would mean Amazon and Barnes & Noble using the wording 'license this
book' instead of 'sell', 'sale', 'purchase' or 'buy'; instead of a price, you
pay a fee.

Nudges, and informed consumers, FTW.

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swanson
Why not just word it as "Read this book"? You pay $X to read the book, you
can't lend it, copy it, re-sell it -- just read it (and re-read it if you
want).

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omarchowdhury
That'll probably result in less conversions for Amazon (compared to "Buy this
book").

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sh1mmer
I agree with many of the article author's points. However, I am also extremely
aware that I typically pay under half the price of the physic book for
e-books. Given that paying authors, editorial and production staff is often
the most significant cost in producing a book I feel like it's a trade-off.

I'm giving up some rights I'd like, for much lower cost item. For the most
part I'm ok with that.

Obviously if there was a better option for lending ebooks I'd take it.

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browsemybooks
So unnecessarily restrictive!

Does anybody have any online resources they can point me to that details the
legalities of lending physical or electronic books?

Thanks.

~~~
flipbrad
in what/which jurisdiction(s)?

