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This Book Will Self-Destruct In 10 Hours

extrarice writes: "See here The "rent-a-book" concept is here. Pay a buck, and you're allowed to read for a cumulative total of 10 hours. After that, the text is inaccessible (unless you somehow access the content you purchased...)"

6 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Thomas Jefferson by crucini · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The thing all you "everything should be free" people don't seem to understand is that it takes an investment to create something, people have to get a return on that investment in order to make the investment worthwhile.
    And the thing you don't seem to understand is that the above argument is infintely applicable in both directions. In other words, it is an argument of the margin, a statement about how human behavior will change with a change in incentive. Therefore, it can be expressed as either:
    • Don't reduce the incentive, or the desired behavior will decrease. (What you're saying.) Or:
    • Increase the incentive, so the desired behavior will increase. (implied).
    So let's declare all published authors and musicians exempt from taxes. That would be an increase in the incentive to produce creative works. Likewise, let's give them all free cars at taxpayer expense. If you deny these requests, it looks like you're just supporting the status quo without any real logic - how did you decide the that current level of incentive is the correct one?
    We need more people helping little old ladies across the street. Let's offer a million dollar reward for doing this. It will be expensive, but it complies with your logic. To turn it around, if the reward were already established policy and I advocated repealing it, you'd point out that this reduction in incentive would lead to a reduction in the desired behavior (helping little old ladies across the street).
    On another note, it is the investor's job to make his investment profitable, not mine. I suggest investing in things people are willing to buy, rather than investing first and then seeking legal protection to make your investment feasible.
  2. Div for books by Brian+Kendig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This sounds a lot like the ill-fated Divx DVD format of two years ago. With Divx, you could buy a DVD and 'unlock' it for any 48-hour period for a few dollars.

    Divx failed because it just wasn't convenient enough for the price ($100 more for a compatible DVD player, and you still had to go to a store for the discs), but this rent-a-book concept doesn't suffer the same problem if the books can simply be downloaded.

    It'll be interesting to see what happens. If the rent-a-book concept succeeds, that means that renting bits (CD's? software?) might catch on again; if it fails, then don't expect to see anything else become rentable on your computer in the next few years.

  3. The Right to Read... by Elwood+P+Dowd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It didn't take that long.

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

    I'm a whore.

    --

    There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
  4. Re:Don't make me laugh by Wraithlyn · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A month? Are you kidding? Try a day or two. Hell, I could crack it right NOW with some sort of jerry rigged automated screen capture and OCR scheme. (Uh oh, I just violated the DMCA by saying that. Good thing I don't live in the States or they'd throw me in a cell with Dimitry)

    When will content publishers realize that security/encryption isn't worth a damn when the end party is NOT TRUSTED. Guess what? If I can read/view/hear it on my computer, there is a way of capturing it, and re-releasing it with no protection. This simple fact will never change. And yet the industries will waste countless millions of dollars trying to invent secure delivery/viewer systems, which is a complete fool's crusade.

    The only answer is to add enough value, that consumers are willing to pay the money to avoid the hassle. What these guys are doing is ADDING MORE hassle, and no real added value.

    --
    "Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
  5. Re:Well... by acceleriter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It doesn't actually sound terribly bad. You have the option of buying the "full", untimed version, for $5, or paying $1 for the ten-hour version.

    Let me get this straight:

    Option 1: I pay almost the same price as for a paperback book. The manufacturing cost is essentially zero, and the royalty to the author is probably unchanged. In return, instead of a paperback book which I may read, trade, lend, give away, or sell at my pleasure, I get an ebook that's locked to one physical device and is not transferable in any way.

    Option 2: I pay a buck for what I essentially can get from the public library, except for less time, less portability, and one dollar more. In addition, I no doubt get to "agree" to some Draconian license that disallows anyone from reading over my shoulder or talking about the book in a negative manner.

    Yep, sounds good to me. Not! Being a Luddite, I'll do just fine reading what's already been published on paper if this actually were to take off. Unfortunately, one of the first big markets for this crap is already a captive audience: college students . If you think this topic doesn't fit into YRO, you haven't been watching the direction things are headed.

    --

    CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.

  6. Re:OMG!!! by sconeu · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut,

    The great thing is this quote by Kurt Vonnegut

    "The e-book is a ridiculous idea," said Vonnegut, who hasn't read his work on a computer and never intends to. "The printed book is so satisfactory, so responsive to our fingertips. So much of this new stuff is utterly unneeded."


    From the Los Angeles Times article on Ebooks.
    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.