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This reminds me a bit of the Baen Books approach to ebooks. They found that giving away some or all of the books in a series as ebooks actually increased the sales of the paper copies. Not the exact same situation but perhaps a common phenomenon at work. I will say that recently I have been streaming more and actually went to the theater a few times after avoiding them for years. It helps that the competition pushed the theaters into substantially improving the experience with reserved seats, better chairs, cleaner floors, etc.

I work in three languages, and I'm still learning, including in my native one. I think it's a good sign that I'm still improving. "Not dead yet." In that sense, people with just a single language are at higher risk of being mentally dead people walking.

You may want to read "Polyglot: How I Learn Languages", KATÓ LOMB, and see if that helps you. (No link, use a search engine.) As to really getting into the language, well, that's also getting into the culture, and takes a lifetime. No shortening that really.

As to the topic at hand, the big upshot of all that technology could be that we have easier access to information. For language learning, e.g. easier access to audio, video, people to converse with in that other language, and so on. Though I still say that right now, we're really only scratching the surface. I don't think that implanting a chip has to be the answer. And I don't think Mr. Must knows shit about this sort of thing. He's good at making stuff happen. Not so good at figuring out the things that should happen. Though he has a couple of interesting ideas going on, and with those already outperforms the vast majority of the silly valley crowd. Case in point "only scratching the surface."

In fact, I don't think chips will or should be the answer. I really don't want a chip in my head to bluescreen then bluescreen my brain. Or get infected because the OS is so shoddy, or whatever else. For a few takes on the ethical implications, compare and contrast "Sisters of Glass", D. W. St John (Baen books, also online), with "A Girl And Her Fed", K. B. Spangler (online webcomic).

Not actors, but this story reminded me of this one:

http://www.baen.com/Chapters/0...

No thanks to any service that requires a special dedicated reader.

I support DRM-free publishers like baen that allow you to download your ebook in whatever format you want. Wish there were more of them.

Reminds me of this short story:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W...

Perhaps we would get more of the old gift culture of the internet back, as in legally free works where the author does not bother with DRM in the first place. The absolute number of those may not increase, but they could gain more visibility when people are angry about excessive DRM and start looking for alternatives.

As an example, I like science fiction novels, and there is quite a bit of free stuff out there.
      - The Baen Free Library, older novels that the publisher Baen Books has released for free, with permission of the authors: http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012
      - The writings of some hobby authors, made available for free on various forums and websites dedicated to such stuff. The quality is varying wildly, of course, but there are some pretty good ones. A favorite of mine is "The Last Angel" by "Proximal Flame", found here: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/

And of course, the warez scene might not be deterred so easily. As today, there might be a lot of cracked stuff circulating that has its DRM removed.

I've been in a 4 year drought for Dresden Files, which looks to end with a light sprinkle this June with a short story anthology, followed hopefully by the next full installment, Peace Talks, in 2019 or 2020. Dude got divorced, met someone new, and got married in the intervening years, so I guess his personal life wasn't in a good stable place for writing books for my needy self, but still ...

Its been an even longer drought in the Heirs of Alexandria series, but the new book All the Plagues of Hell should be arriving in stores just in time for Christmas.

My favorite author Eric Flint reports being about 2/3rds done with the next (third) installment in the Joe's World series too. The second book, Forward the Mage, is one of my favorite novels ever, but many people I show it to can't stand it. Its likely unlike anything else you've ever read (for a small taste, half the book has as a conceit that it was written by a hostile narrator. And that's not even the weird part...).

Movie -wise, of course Black Panther. My current stressor is that nobody appears to be showing it in 3D IMAX (seriously, check Fandango in your area. I found a *single* 3D IMAX showing in LA on 2/17, but none in my hometown, Manhattan, Philly, or anywhere else I checked). Next most interested is Captain Marvel. Besides that we have the whole upcoming Marvel wave of movies.

Netflix, new season of Jessica Jones should drop soon along with all her friends. Hopefully next season Defenders will live up to its promise a bit better, and Iron Fist will be a bit less of a drag on the franchise.

The first Netflix Godzilla flick was really cool, although it was more like Attack on Titan with Godzilla than it was a Godzilla movie. The post-credit scene (make sure you watch that!) held out hope for it upcoming series being more interesting though.

Which brings up Attack on Titan. After a several year hiatus, its second season I believe is currently ongoing. So it should hit Netflix later this year, or early next year at the latest.

Youtube, the new season of Critical Role has just started with all new level-2 characters. Episode 4 I believe will be streaming tonight at 7 Pacific (too late for my old-timey self), and up on Youtube next Monday. At 4+ hours each, that gives you just enough time to listen to the first three eps if you start right now. :-)

I am reminded of Spider Robinson's short story "Melancholy Elephants" (Hugo winner in 1983 for best short story), wherein a woman confronts a Congressman, trying to get him to throw his influence against a bill that would extend the term of copyright to perpetuity, arguing that with the increased longevity of humanity it would cause irreparable harm to the human race. The link is to the story in the Baen Free Library; read it.

Reminds me of this story:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W...

That's one of the main points of developing a general-purpose AI.

That's what I read in the 1980's.

Just as adaptable as a human brain, but without the messy and expensive biological needs.

I guess you're never read "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. ;)

Raymond Dyer's project had developed the first genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence that could learn and change its own programming to meet unanticipated problems. But could the AI—code-named Spartacus—be trusted to obey its makers And if it went rogue, could it be shut down As an acid test, Spartacus was put in charge of a space station and programmed with a survival instinct. Dyer and his team had the job of seeing how far the computer would go to defend itself when they tried to pull the plug. Dyer didn't expect any serious problems to arise in the experiment.

http://www.baen.com/the-two-faces-of-tomorrow.html

Again, begging the question: you still accept the theory that it is enforcement of rights that motivates people to create. You just shift the goalposts a little by saying that there are enough honest people to make it work.

The simpler model is that people like to create things, and given decent access to creation, enough people are willing to pay that this is a viable living for creators. The commercial artists who experimented with a low-threshold access to material (by not enforcing copyright) showed us empirical data that this is in fact a more likely explanation of reality.

This study merely confirms what people like Eric Flint already told us 16 years ago.

They actually know better, and acknowledge it in their advertising, although subtly.

"Own it today on Blu-Ray or DVD!"

They have advertised the product for PURCHASE, not LEASE. It's OWNED by the buyer, not LICENSED to them. After making that statement in their advertising, they can not enforce a "non-transferable license" unless we LET them.

eBooks SHOULD cost less, because costs of printing, distribution and storage are effectively ZERO. Previous analysis of this demonstrates that approximately 65% of the cost of a hardback is eliminated by the eBook (http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/1655202/publishers-warned-on-ebook-prices). So a hardback priced at $25 should be about $9 as an eBook.

I refer you to http://baen.com/ Best ebook sellers on the planet, in my opinion.

If the publishers were selling eBooks at a 65% markdown compared to their hardbacks, they would see less piracy. Baen books are hardly ever found on piracy sites, according to the publisher.

I am fully in favor of the first sale doctrine and the existence of a used market in eBooks and other digital media. But I also see the arguments opposing duplication. There is no question in MY mind that I OWN these piles of bits; but until the technology catches up, what I see as the ethical choice is to DELETE materials I transfer to others, to deal directly with the original publishers when I cannot ensure my seller is deleting their copy, and only do business with companies whose business practice reflects my own opinions. Like Baen.

It's the same problem that the printing press created: "anybody" could print and sell these books. It's what the copyright developed to control. By current copyright law, Ben Franklin was a pirate.

And because I'm generally law abiding, I've never bought an e-book. I have a few thousand, mainly from The Gutenberg Project. (Well perhaps I've bought one or two that clearly had no DRM. Baen Books http://www.baen.com/ used to sell some that way, but I find on-line advertising for books to be nearly intolerable. Somehow the people who do it don't get the idea.)

Of course, a contributing factor is that I don't like the form factor. I bought a Nook through Radio Shack, back before it had turned into a phone store, and it sort of works, but it doesn't feel comfortable to read. People talk about reading on their phones, but those screens are so small that I can't understand it. Also e-books commonly botch up graphics horribly...and that's weird. The same book in html will often be fine. Perhaps commercial works are put together better, but until they stop using DRM I'll never know.

All my books on my Kobos, Nook and iPad are DRM free.
And besides one or two "iBooks" they are all *.epub

e.g. see: http://www.obooko.com/, http://www.baen.com/baenebooks, http://www.gutenberg.org/

Plenty of "free" or "trial" download sites you find here:
http://www.freemake.com/blog/2...

Cheap and also free books: https://www.smashwords.com/

Want to do the right thing? Want to get treated like an honest person, like a customer?

http://www.baen.com/baenebooks

DRM free book publisher.

Well, I know the reverse situation was written: Michael Z. Williamson's "Freehold". It's even free to read, in ebook form.

All hail the Baen Free Library!!

Replace your antennas with SMA dummy loads. No tinfoil required.

Tinfoil is always required; remember Aluminum foil is no substitute for real tinfoil. j/k Tim S. PS: Join the TFHB (Tin foil hat brigade) on http://bar.baen.com/ and read free Sci-Fi from the Slash Pile. Membership in the TFHB not required to read free Sci-Fi.

Yes there is margin.

But not launching on the exact instant when the ISS inclination is properly aligned with the launch site is expensive. The shuttle launches had to sacrifice 1100kg of payload in order to have a 10 minute wide launch window.

For a robotic launch where you can easily safe the vehicle after a scrub and don't have to unload passengers from the capsule, delaying 23h37m is not a huge deal. So you go with a much shorter launch window and gain a lot more payload to orbit. And if things don't go as planned, you scrub for a day and try again.

+/- 5 minutes was the shuttle's window and it cost 1100kg of payload to have a window that large (reference link).

The dog-leg cost of slipping into the proper inclination orbit with a launch that is mistimed can huge. On the order of hundreds of dV required to fix the issue.

So for robotic launches, where you don't have crew sitting in a capsule / vessel, and scrubs are relatively cheap as a result, it's better to go for a very small launch window (~1 second) to maximize payload.

A bad person would be more capable of doing harm when aided by an AI doing planning, co-ordination, or execution.

This sounds vaguely like the plot of the short story "A Logic Named Joe", where home computing and access terminals are commonplace, and one of them with a random error starts combining existing knowledge pieces to satisfy user requests, subverting existing safety filters. An example from the story: "How do I kill my wife and get away with it?" would normally be gated as vague, and dangerous, but in this story the "logic" determines that green shoe polish would be fatal to blondes and could be painted on a frozen TV dinner. Also available as a Baen Free Book.

Much closer to the internet:

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W...

Whenever I read an article on here about extending copyright or patent durations, I'm reminded of the short story Melancholy Elephants. Full text available at http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm. Well worth a few minutes' time.

Sorry, book sellers group it like this since, how long? Since Harry Potter?

Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne, Indiana) had The Lord of the Rings in its "Science Fiction and Fantasy" section in late 1993. This was three and a half years before first publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

I don't know, I assume the 'free market' prevents him from getting a deal with any publisher at all, if he does not agree to slavery terms?

An author could always be his own publisher, hiring an editor and having books printed through a contract printer. Or he could sign a time-limited contract with a publisher and have copyrights revert to him after a decade. Or he could license the rights to a publisher throughout the industrialized Anglosphere (US, CA, GB, IE, AU, NZ, ZA) but retain rights in the rest of the world, as the Authors Guild suggests. Or an author could sign with Baen, a publisher that not only specializes in speculative fiction but also "gets it" with respect to e-books. Baen offers e-books with no digital restrictions management, releases many of its authors' older works as free samples in the Baen Free Library, and even offers paid early access to the public.

DRM-free ebooks for nearly 20 years.

The science and technology are amazingly accurate, the social and cultural changes are not even close

You make me think of Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe. Leinster predicted the internet in 1946 but got society wrong; times change.

Nobody can predict people.

I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.

Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.

I also recommend the John Christian Falkenberg stories by Jerry Pournelle.

Baen sells them all collected into a single volume, which is called The Prince. (He had a co-author for "Go Tell the Spartans" and "Prince of Sparta" but most of the book is just by Pournelle.)

http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200209/0743435567.htm

Asimov wasn't a futurist, he was a science fiction (and nonfiction) writer. One of my favorites (a thank you to the submitter), in fact. And most (although not all) of his sci-fi was set way into the future; Foundation" was 20,000 years from now.

His Sally, (full text here) set in the year 2020, didn't have flying cars but did have self-driving cars using his famous "positronic brains" (computers were often called "electronic brains" back then). He was a little early with it, Sally was an antique so she would have been manufactured before 1995.

Asimov came close to envisioning the internet with his "Multivac", although Murray Leinster almost nailed it in 1946 with A Logic Named Joe (full text here).

As to "futurists", hogwash. In what school can I get a degree in futurism?

Agreed. Nothing like sitting in traffic in a Mustang with a 302 Coyote engine.

I'm reminded of "Yuppiedrone", an old song making fun of yuppies, with a line that brags that his BMW will do 100mph in ten seconds or something and "it takes an hour to go five miles."

You're exactly right, this isn't for 100 mile trips any more than a motorized bicycle or motor scooter is. You'd still need a car, but it would be handy, cheap to drive as well as being really fucking cool!

Am I the only geezer here today? I'd expect someone to point out that the 21st century is a science fiction fantasy, just like we thought it'd be, and it's even wilder than we imagined. I don't remember seeing any folding cars in anything I've read... but then, I didn't know that Murray Leinster predicted the internet (full text of story in link) in 1946, either.

Magazines can charge subscription fees to the extent that there is value in the content. Magazines can sell advertizing to the extent that people see the content. There is a spectrum here, a slider (if you will) that you can set anywhere between two extremes.

You're currently betwixt those two extremes. If you move to a model exclusively one way or the other, then the answer is obvious.

A printed magazine is inconvenient to duplicate, so can survive on subscription fees for content. An online magazine costs nothing to duplicate, so subscription fees for content is unworkable.

Drop subscription fees altogether and get all revenue from advertizing. Your reader base will skyrocket, making the publication a better value for advertizing.

Baen Books posts their older books for free on the net. Surprisingly, this increased hard-copy sales and opened their publications to a much wider audience. Eric Flint's explanation is a good read.

(And many of the free online Baen books are a good read as well.)

Note that I'm expounding the virtues of Baen Books to this website read by hundreds of thousands each day. Your magazine could do worse than be one of the handful of well-respected companies whose product is based on customer value.

And for reference, count the myriad websites that give value to the user and survive on advertizing alone. XKCD and Hackaday for example. Not websites that rely on users that add value, but websites that actually have value that the user wants. Randall Munroe lets others cite and copy his work virtually everywhere so long as it's not for money.

Transition to an open online model and throw it out to the world. Become a respected product of value.

Actually, a futurist back in 1876 predicted that we would have a horrible environmental problem a hundred years into his fuuture, and the problem he pointed out was exactly what you said, that we would be knee deep in manure.

Shows how much the so-called "futurists" know. Where's my flying car, my singularity, my personal robot... Science fiction writers do a better job of "predicting" the future than futurists. Where were the futurists in 1946 when Murray Leinster Predicted the internet? (full text of the story at the link).

I'll listen to oceanographers, environmental scientists, climate researchers, but futurists are frauds, plain and simple.

The Proteus operation is not one of Hogan's better works. If you are willing to give him another try, try Voyage from Yesteryear, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, or Code of the Lifemaker, which are all about post-scarcity technologies in various ways as hard sci-fi. It is the post-scarcity aspects that are similar, even if Hogan's are much more near-term.

The thing about writers is, it may take decades for people to learn about the prose that stands the test of time. So, I guess most authors may be old by the time that happens.

An on-line page turner for me by Roger Williams, even if too graphically violent:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Bound to be other great voices out there.

I like some of Peter F. Hamilton's stuff, although again it is too graphically violent for my tastes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reality_Dysfunction

I really like Bruce Sterling's "Schismatrix":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismatrix

I read somewhere that modern sci-fi is so hard to write because it gets boring because things are so safe (or just crazy -- e.g. anything goes nanotech). Larry Niven faced that and supposedly threw away a lot of his stories about the "Teela" gene time of lucky people who won a birth lottery, because they were too boring. Space exploration to other planets like Star Trek linked to what people knew of exploring new continents and islands on Earth. What can really connect to what people know when talking about deeply different virtual reality and nanotech and robotics? It's probably pretty hard to write a story interesting to humans.

Even Iain Banks struggled with that, having to write stories in ages when the human form was popular in the Culture (he says sometimes it was not popular) and writing about "Special Circumstances" having adventures on non-Culture worlds.

I've pretty much stopped buying sci-fi novel though (compared to buying one or two dozen a year a couple decades ago). The current ongoing changes are pretty much too exciting as they are. :-) Hard to recall the last new novel I've bought, although I've reread some old ones...

Sarah Zettel is an interesting author (blending Islamic ideas with science fiction themes, example, a woman starship captain who wears a burka and goes through all sorts of hoops to keep correct by the law -- the core theme of the book is about AI though):
http://www.amazon.com/Fools-War-Sarah-Zettel/dp/0446602930

Baen might have younger novelists somewhere?
http://www.baen.com/

http://www.baen.com/library/prime_palaver1.asp

Copyright infringement is not comparable to bank robbing. At it's worst, it's comparable to children snitching candy. It's a problem that doesn't really need solving. Piracy is free advertising.

I'm not interested in "protecting" "intellectual property". Entertain the people, and the people will reward you.

http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp

Jim Baen sold books, rather than software. But his views are pertinent to any digital distributor. Anyone who bothers to ask slashdot about digital rights has obviously given things some semi-serious thought. Include Jim's ideas in your thinking.

First few paragraphs of that page follow:

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow. My own opinion, summarized briefly, is as follows:

1. Online piracy — while it is definitely illegal and immoral — is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.

2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.

3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market — especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people — is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.

In the course of this debate, I mentioned it to my publisher Jim Baen. He more or less virtually snorted and expressed the opinion that if one of his authors — how about you, Eric? — were willing to put up a book for free online that the resulting publicity would more than offset any losses the author might suffer.

The minute he made the proposal, I realized he was right. After all, Dave Weber's On Basilisk Station has been available for free as a "loss leader" for Baen's for-pay experiment "Webscriptions" for months now. And — hey, whaddaya know? — over that time it's become Baen's most popular backlist title in paper!

And so I volunteered my first novel, Mother of Demons, to prove the case. And the next day Mother of Demons went up online, offered to the public for free.

Sure enough, within a day, I received at least half a dozen messages (some posted in public forums, others by private email) from people who told me that, based on hearing about the episode a

"Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no 'want' associated with it. YOU want information to be free, even information that other people spent money creating. That's an entirely different thing."

People misunderstand this because of the "too cute" way it is phrased. It is more akin to the old saying "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." In this modern, networked age keeping information secret requires a tremendous effort, while spreading information is trivial. (And that's what it comes down to, secrecy. Preventing people from knowing the information without jumping through whatever financial or institutional hoops they are supposed to jump through to view, read or listen to the information.) Because of this, nasty, draconian laws with out-sized police state penalties are the approach used by most copyright holders:

"There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!" -- Baen Free Library: Introduction by Eric Flint

If Aaron Swartz is guilty of breaking the laws he was accused of breaking, MIT's administration is also guilty because they left the doors to JSTOR's vault open on purpose so that pretty much anyone could come in off the street and "steal" JSTOR's "crown jewels." If I were a "creative" prosecutor like Heymann, I'm sure I could come up with tons of crimes to charge the MIT staff with... but MIT has the political clout to fight back. They could have extended that clout to protect Aaron Swartz, but preferred to see him prosecuted. Why, I'm not sure. Heymann and Ortiz may suffer political setbacks from this (though powerful parts of the establishment are cheering them, never doubt it), but MIT as an institution has permanently tarnished its reputation, which was built on a "Wild West" approach to technology. No reason to treat them as a haven for eccentric techies any more... in fact you are probably better off attending a more obscure school if you don't want to be under Big Brother-esque surveillance these days. No techie who isn't a stickler for "respect for the rules" (what creative minds such sticklers have, too!) should even consider MIT as a school of choice any more.

You wouldn't have expected that from MIT, which prior to the Swartz suicide was a kind of Hacker Mecca. Now, of course, that reputation should be permanently tarnished, and talented people shouldn't put any stock in it.

No free books and music
No free games

Wtf is wrong with the world

Free books you say? How about here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ and here: http://www.baen.com/library/

Free music? Probably plenty here: http://archive.org/ and here: http://www.youtube.com/ (I'm sure there are plenty of worthwhile indy artists that put there music up there on YouTube to be freely downloaded and enjoyed. As for games, I don't know. Perhaps someone else can post a site with games that are freely downloadable.

I hope so, kinda useless otherwise. Of course, only one place to buy that content from.

The are hundreds of thousands of free e-books available for the Kindle.

Free Book Collections

Baen Free Library

Munseys

The chances are quite good that you can borrow e-books formatted for the Kindle through the online services of your local public library:

Nioga Digital Home [Western New York]

Very few got the internet

Only two I know of, and they both got it wrong. Asimov got it VERY wrong (multivac). The other was Murray Leinster in his 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" (the full story is linked above). Oddly, his internet was fully censored and a faulty "logic" (computer) disabled the censorship. Exactly the opposite is happening in the real future -- we started out with a completely free and open internet, and its (and our) freedom is under assault by authoritarians every day.

I, for one, hope this results in lower eBook prices.

I have a Kindle (and Nook tablet) that are underutilized because I refuse to pay more for an eBook than I do to have a paper book delivered to my house. About the only eBooks I read are from Smashwords or Baen. Almost every book I've bought from Amazon has been a used paper book because they are typically about half the price of an eBook.

After 2 years with the Kindle, I've bought exactly 3 Amazon eBooks - all purchased before traveling since I didn't want to carry around heavy paper books. I've never gotten around to reselling my used books (which would net me another dollar or two of savings), so my local thrift shop has been getting them.

I agree I also refuse to pay higher prices for a download. To date I have only purchased one ebook for our kindle which is two years old.

I, for one, hope this results in lower eBook prices.

I have a Kindle (and Nook tablet) that are underutilized because I refuse to pay more for an eBook than I do to have a paper book delivered to my house. About the only eBooks I read are from Smashwords or Baen. Almost every book I've bought from Amazon has been a used paper book because they are typically about half the price of an eBook.

After 2 years with the Kindle, I've bought exactly 3 Amazon eBooks - all purchased before traveling since I didn't want to carry around heavy paper books. I've never gotten around to reselling my used books (which would net me another dollar or two of savings), so my local thrift shop has been getting them.

Murray Leinster figured this out in 1946.

If your smart phone is an Apple iOS device, you can use GoodReader for PDFs and it will do a very good job of reflowing text so you can search and read PDFs at a comfortable font size. I suspect there may be a similar app for Android smart phones.

Again using an existing smart phone for your initial experimentation lets you get a feel for ebook reading, and based on what you want to read, it may help inform your tablet/dedicated ereader decision.

If most of your reading will be PDFs and you really need to graphics and/or code examples to be displayed as intended by the author, then I would suggest a tablet with a larger screen and good PDF support (as someone has mentioned an iPad with GoodReader can do wonders for PDF reading).

If at all possible, find places that will let you play with the potential devices to make sure it will satisfy your needs. Many Kindle devices are available to play with in various stores, Nooks are on display in most Barnes & Noble bookstores, iPads are in Apple Stores, and retailers that also sell Apple devices, Android tables are in many retailers (but since Android tablets are made by many manufactures, make sure you try and like any you decide to get as they are not all created equal).

I own a Kindle (and a Nook running cyanogenmod), but I still read most books on paper.

Not because I don't want to read them on the Kindle, but because a used book is often half (or less) the price of a used book including delivery. And I can still sell it for a buck or two when I'm done.

I read the occasional title from Baen or Smashwords, but I've bought only a handful of Kindle/Nook titles in the past 2 years.

As long as you don't care about reading new releases as soon as they are published, buying used is the way to go.

As an example, looking at a random book from a 2011 bestsellers list "The Tiger's Wife". Prices including delivery (assuming Amazon Prime free delivery):

New Hardcover: $10.50 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
Used Hardcover: $6.57 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
New Paperback: $10.20 (two day Amazon Prime delivery)
Used Paperback: $6.37 (standard shipping)
Kindle Edition: $11.99

Why pay more for the Kindle edition than it costs to buy and deliver a brand new book? About the only time I prefer an eBook is when I'm traveling and don't want to carry a heavy book(s) along with me.

Most unappreciated has to go to Poul Anderson.

He wrote so much stuff, and almost all of it top-notch. His name deserves to be right up there with Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein.

The Flandry books. The van Rijn books. The Time Patrol. The Hoka books!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson

http://baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=panderson

His work was nominated for Hugo awards on numerous occasions, but the top names released popular stories at the same time and he lost to those.

Somewhere I saw a discussion of the best SF books to give to SF-hating friends to try to win them over. The Time Patrol books were chosen by several. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is fantastic.

Baen collected all the Time Patrol stuff into one mega volume:

http://www.baenebooks.com/p-428-time-patrol.aspx

You can read the first novella and most of the second one for free at the above link (click on "View sample chapters").

steveha

On the pricing, if you like the sort of books they sell, you should check out baenebooks.com. Baen is a regular publisher of fantasy and sci-fi, mostly with a military bent, which has for over a decade sold all of their books in electronic as well as print form. Single e-books are normally $4-6, with no sales tax or shipping (obviously). They also have a monthly bundle for $18 which includes six full novels, 1-2 of them new releases (usually available a few weeks before the books show up in stores) and the remainder older titles. $3 per book is a great price. It's often even better than that, because Baen tends to republish a lot of their older popular series in "omnibus" editions, so a single title of a bundle may actually contain a full trilogy. I've purchased bundles that contained 11-12 novels.

Also, Baen provides all of the major electronic formats, with no DRM, and encourages sharing your books with friends and families where "sharing" means "giving them copies". Baen also keeps all of your purchases on file so you can easily re-download books as needed.

Finally, Baen also provides an extensive free library so you can try out many of their authors and series at no cost, doesn't object to people sharing on-line copies of the CDs they put in the backs of some of their hardcovers (containing dozens of novels each, plus high-quality copies of cover art and other goodies), and provides free access to the first few chapters of all of their books, so you can try any book before buying.

(Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Baen, other than having spent more money than I like to think about buying their books. My Baen library runs to nearly 500 titles.)

Murray Leinster predicted the internet in the March 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction in a story titled A Logic Named Joe (full text at the link).

ForumSpring Engineers really shouldn't have answered the question, "How do I hack the ForumSpring servers?"

Heh, I refer you to A Logic Named Joe. It predicted the personal computer, the internet, search engines, and the real uses which most people would find for them. In 1946. Nineteen. Forty. Six.

So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it"

To some extent this has been tested with e-books. Baen Books (http://www.baen.com/) has introduced the Free Library a few years ago, where they made some of their older titles available as legal downloads, even without DRM. So there was suddenly a perfect opportunity to get some books for free, which were previously only available on paper and for $.

The result was that sales of the paper versions went up, not down. Obviously the marketing effect exceeded the loss from people who chose to download and not to pay for the e-books.

Now it is possible that this went at the expense of other authors, because the people who bought stuff from Free Library authors found their reading needs satisfied and bought less elsewhere. But that would be difficult to prove.

In the end, we still have only a gut feeling that piracy hurts business, but where actual effects can be measured, the effects of piracy seem to be small or even negative..

The world of the future they envisioned was also one where they still controlled all content distribution.....They never really thought about the implications of people being able to store and transmit massive video libraries on their own

A good example of what you're talking about is Murray Leinster's 1946 short story A Logic Named Joe (the story is at the supplied link).

I was thinking of the same episode. It's weird how we've surpassed almost all of the science fiction of my youth, let alone that written before I was born. In 1966 everything in Star Trek was pure fantasy -- doors that opened all by themselves, space shuttles, talking voice-activated computers with flat screens, communicators, McCoy's sick bay (you kids can't imagine how primitive medicine was in 1966), Uhura's bluetooth earpiece... all fantasy that nobody ever expected to actually see in their lifetimes. Yet the only things from STOS we don't have today is matter replicators and warp drives.

I live in the science fiction future of my youth!