Doctorow: Ebooks Neither E Nor Books

Word wrap? by ackthpt · 2004-02-13 04:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

I wouldn't read e-books either if they have this same problem with no-word-wrap. Horizontal scrolling to read in my humble experience is annoying, too bad someone didn't do a better job of formatting it.

I can't think of many examples where I've prefered an e-reference over printed matter. The paradigm is that paper is portable and requires no power (aside from a light source) to read, never expires, never needs an upgrade (other than me needing glasses, which would apply equally in either case) and is durable (drop my Zaurus or laptop and I'll cry, drop my book and I'll just pick it back up.)

Complimenting e-books and paper seems reasonable, though I'll go to the paper first every time.

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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar

Re:Word wrap? by senatorpjt · 2004-02-13 15:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Am I the only person that finds black-on-white text incredibly irritating? I try to set my apps to grey-on-black text whenever possible, at the expense of appearance. White backgrounds give me a headache after looking at them for a few minutes.

Paper manuals by LostCluster · 2004-02-13 04:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

Several open source projects like MySQLhave found a way to make money by selling their maunal as a printed book, even though all of the content of said book is already available online. Some people just like having their documentation on paper so they have more screen space for other things.

eBooks, failure? by bnlrules · 2004-02-13 04:32 · Score: 5, Interesting

I work for a large corporate library with a large collection of eBooks. They are easily more popular than the hard copies. For quick reference they can't be beat!

Re:Get yer eBook here! by pigpogm · 2004-02-13 04:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

Hey, if we're doing a spot of shameless plugging here, i'll risk a few karma points ;)

My partner has written a book, which after failing to get it off the ground by selling it, we decided to make into an e-book and give away for free. It's a bit different to almost any other books, in that it's laid out from articles and clippings from assorted fictional magazines, books, and newspapers, with lots of pictures. Nice and easy to read on a computer screen, though.

More info, and download as a PDF, at http://pigpog.com/mblm/. There's also the option to just read it online, but only part of it is up there so far - enough to decide if it's worth the download, though.

It's the story of a boy band from the 80s, based in the UK. They rise to reasonable fame, then fall back to obscurity. Except one of them can't take the obscurity, and hatches a plan to return...

Our vague plan for getting anything back from this is that she's working on the second book in the story, which will hopefully be sold in a slightly more conventional way.

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PigPog.

The real reason for Ebook by Lord+Apathy · 2004-02-13 04:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ebooks aren't dead. People just haven't caught on to the real reasons to read ebooks on your palm pilot other than a real book. Compactness, you can cram about a 100 ebooks on an average 128mb memory stick. This is the eqivilant of carrying a small library with you every where you go. An this is very important. Nothing is worse than being suck on the can with nothing to read.

This goes to my second reason with compactness. You can stick a palm pilot in you pocket when you head to the can at work. It looks less suspicous when you head to the head to take a shi than if you had a book under your arm. Boss won't notice as much.

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Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification

Paper book ruling: random access and low cost by jorlando · 2004-02-13 04:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

ebook will fail along they still expensive. you can buy a cheap edition of some book, even a best seller, read it during an airplane trip and discard it. you can't do it with a ebook reader.

ebook reader's are expensive. I remember a model that had a cover with "leather smell", to appeal to paper book readers, another marketing moron displaying it's stupidity: a reader reads a book because of the contents. judging a book for it's cover is for illiterates... or marketing morons.

reading on a gorgeous wide and tall screen of a palm sized device doesn't fit in my sense of confort.

an last but not least, random access... you can flip through the pages of a book as you wish, looking for random passages or particular points of the text. the close to a book flip that you can do with a ebook reader is the fast forward, backward, or select a given page... not that bad.

ebooks can be a huge success when cheap reader appear. something with a screen the size of a pocket book, with good contrast, backlight could be a plus, but not essential. also an ebook not tied to some proprietary DRMed format. I want to download some of the classicals available at the project Guthenberg or simmilars and read it. and a cheaper price tag. if the costs of distribution, stocking are being cutted, I want my share.

Re:Paper book ruling: random access and low cost by jp10558 · 2004-02-13 07:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

Well, I think the main reason's e-books have not taken off is a mismanagement of the end user experiance. What am I talking about?

The e-book reading experiance.

We need readers of some sort - for techs PDA's make sense, but I hesitate to say that should be the answer for everyone. One of the best readers in my opinion was the RCA REB 1100 e-book. It was easy to use, it was comfortable and well designed overall. Too bad they decided on stupid DRM and couldn't market it right.

A disclaimer - I am not a business or marketing major. What follows is what I as a consumer thinks would sell. I have no facts to back this up, only acnetadotes.

Take the hardware of the REB1100. That was great. battery lasted 20hrs. With the backlight on. 2 buttons placed so your thumb could easily hit them while holding the reader. The button under your thumb was to go forward a page(this could be changed in settings though). You could change the page orintation so when switching hands you could flip the book and again hold it comfortably and still read it(right side up). Smart Media slot, expand the memory up to 64mb. Comes with 8mb internal. I have a 32mb card in mine, but never use it... I just don't keep THAT many books on there at once, but if you want to - go for it! Has a built in dictionary, double tap a word and it looks it up, but does so over your book, so when done, close the window and you haven't moved.

Now to address the problems.

1. Make the dictionary expandible or replaceable(you can remove it altogether for memory)
2. Change the DRM. Make it easy for you to add your own content - (Avant Go for it) allow html, doc, rtf, whatever format - as many as you can to go into the book. And this would happen not in the book but at the computer - this is software only really.
3. Price. The REB1100 is not worth $299. Look at PalmOne. Try getting the price down to $80 - $120. It is worth that much. That's in line with other handhelds. Or - do something like cell phone providers do. Buy a 2 year book of the month subscription for $20 a month and 5 new books per month or magizine subscription, newspaper, add in the online option below) and get X off the price of the reader.
4. Price of books. I know BookWarez, and that you can easily create your own titles as a user but wait.
How about Magizine subscriptions? Newspapers? etc... provide that at prices less than the paper copies and now it makes sense to pay for them. As a consumer I would get a subscription if offered for %50-75% of the print copy if it was all integrated. I.E. I plug in my book once a day to either my computer or plug a phone line to the integrated modem and dial up the toll free # and get my subscriptions. Sell e-books for $2-$3 each. See if you can sell them earlier than the print copy coming out. They did this ... I can see that pushing the adoption of the books. But you cannot charge $26 a book, I(and I suspect everyone else) would just buy the hardcopy. But again, if on a hardcover release you came out with the e-book about 2-4 weeks earlier for $15, that would sell. Once paperback is going to ship, again maybe a month before the paperback edition lower your price to $2-$4 for the book. You could make a killing(assuming the publisher wasn't asking HUGE roylities).
5. Add a (limited) web browsing option. Like sprint on their phones... say for $3 a month on a local dialup with the modem, and some per min rate for the toll free #(because I know the phone company charges like $0.10/min so you can't really do a flat rate without losing money here)(Using your bookshelf/buying books would be free with the toll free #, you'd get that figured out in the book prices).
6. Market it. Play up the savings on books. Play up the early releases. Play up the ease of subscription and having back issues available and searchable. etc...

I don't know if this is feasible. No one has gotten this to work yet. Softbook failed. Rocketbook Failed. RCA Failed. Gemstar Failed.

But they f

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Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3

The big problem... by Hiro+Antagonist · 2004-02-13 04:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

The big problem with ebooks lies in the readers; devices capable of reading ebooks are bulky, fragile, expensive, and nominally not as easy on the eyes as paper; in addition, most of them are read-only, which means that you can't write notes in the margin or hilight passages for later use.

Personally, I'd like to see a low-power (eight to sixteen hours on a single charge) tablet-PC-like device, one which is as easy on the eyes as a normal book (not that hard, really[1]), has a small-but-useful amount of storage (say, 8M of RAM and 512M of compactflash), and into which I can upload textbooks and course notes for all of my college courses. It has to be durable as well; I should be able to accidentally knock this thing off a table into an aquarium, and it should still work.

Give it some simple handwriting recognition, some decent calculation software, and the ability to link up with a desktop via a USB cable, and you could sell tons of these things to college students. I know I'd jump at the opportunity to not lug around a 40lb backpack, laptop case, two-inch binder filled with notes...oh, and a rew reference manuals...even if it cost me a few hundred bucks. Textbook publishers could also get in on the game; charge half as much for an E-book (which can't be resold), and use this as incentive to sell the tablet devices. Everyone wins -- the publishers make more money (no printing, shipping, or warehousing costs), the tablet maker wins, and the students win (less back strain, cheaper textbooks, ability to have an entire library in a satchel).

[1] If you're willing to keep it black-and-white, just use a farly high-resolution LCD, and use a plain white sheet of paper as a background; the paper will reflect ambient light properly, except where the LCD is active -- presto, paper-like black-on-white text, just like a book.

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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy .sig.

the right niche for them by bigbigbison · 2004-02-13 04:51 · Score: 4, Interesting

I am a phd student and as a result I am often writing research papers with lots of references. I know that I would LOVE to have ebook versions of the books I read so that I wouldn't have to spend so much time trying to find one line or one paragraph in a book that talked about something I want to cite. I would love to be able to do a keywork seach for these books. It would help sooo much.

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http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players

My response. by nilspace · 2004-02-13 04:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

Open speech in Firefox. -A -C Open Word processor -V Click "little-r" (for ebook reader) Conversion to eBook & sync'd to iPaq. Now I can read why eBooks didn't make it on my handheld, like I have for all of his books, as well as about 3 dozen others.

e-books are irrellevent by -tji · 2004-02-13 04:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

As someone who recently purchased his "Down and out in the Magic Kingdom", I would say the e-book had almost no influence on my purchase. I knew about it being available online, and it did give Cory "cool points" for being involved in the creative commons and other excellent projects. But, I never even looked at the online version.

I purchased in the traditional way.. I browsed it on the shelves of my local small bookstore. I then checked if it was available at my local used bookstore. When it wasn't there, I returned to the small bookstore & purchased it there. (The two stores are next door to each other.. very handy.)

As Cory acknowledges, noone is going to read a text of significant duration online. Until there is an e-book reader device that can better replicate the look/feel/portability/durability of paper and won't strain my eyes, then I'm sticking to paperbacks.

Re:tease value by DdJ · 2004-02-13 05:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

Of course some say print is dead. But if print is dead then so too is the novel. No one wants to read 300 plus pages on a screen. And more importantly, no one wants to re-read a novel on screen. Very little interaction with the object there. No sense of "consumption."

I can only say that I hope you're right as far as most of the population is concerned, because I know you're wrong as far as I'm concerned. I've gotten to the point where I actually prefer to read novels on my handheld. A recent novel I bought came with a CD-ROM containing the same novel in electronic form. I loaded it on to my palm and then proceeded to totally ignore the actual book.

I've read several full-length novels this way now, and speaking only for myself, I absolutely prefer it, by a fairly wide margin. I have an entire library in my pocket all the time, the book mark never falls out, and I can read in the dark. Hurah for the Baen free library!

ebooks is all I read anymore by jridley · 2004-02-13 05:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

I read books only on my Palm anymore. I certainly would prefer to read on paper instead of my IIIxe's greenish screen (I'm upgrading soon), but I never carry books around with me, and if I do, just in my bag so I only have them at my desk.

With 3 or 4 books in my Palm, I've got a book to read everywhere. I've read 10 times more books since using the Palm than when on paper.

Also we're way over capacity on paper books in our house; we just don't have room for what we have. We have about 300 linear feet of shelf space, much of it double-shelved, and another couple hundred pounds of books in boxes. I'm just not going to add to that by buying more paper.

Thank God for Baen books. I'd decided not to buy from Peanut Press anymore because I dislike having to remember credit card numbers from 5 years ago to unlock books, and I dislike paying as much for eBooks as for paper; I should at least get a few bucks off.

Baen publishes much of their catalog electronically, in open formats, at reasonable prices.

Re:tease value by nathan+s · 2004-02-13 05:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've seen thousands of times people saying that they don't read books on the computer. I honestly don't understand this. My eyes are equally uncomfortable after 8-hour marathon reading sessions and spending 8 hours staring at a screen. There is little to no difference to me as to whether I'll read something online or offline, rather than cost and the 'reading room' factor [don't really feel like carrying digital devices in there]. So effectively I end up reading almost every book I've read in the past three years on my regular desktop screen or laptop LCD, and have found it to be little different in terms of strain/ease of use.

I suspect that the largest difference is really one of habituation. People grow up attaching certain expectations/sentimental values to the process of reading and do prefer print, but I'm not at all convinced that print is any less harsh on your eyes than screen. Remind yourself to blink once in a while and you'll probably be fine in both cases.

Personally, I really hope e-books take off. The Gutenberg project has been a part of my life since I was 14 and discovered it on a local BBS, and I have since found that almost anything I wish to read can be found digitized.

The only real complaint I have with e-books are the unauthorized scans of books - they tend to be poorly edited, or constructed using the "OCR and publish" method without any preview/cleanup at all. But, that's a side effect of my choice to read such scans, and I'm not complaining excessively.

Just a bunch of random thoughts..maybe someone will find it interesting.:-)

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picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!

Re:This is totally offtopic...but by speleo · 2004-02-13 05:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

I site I administer got Slashdotted back in December. The story was posted on a Sunday.

Here's the platform summary for that day:

Windows: 65.17%
Macintosh: 16.10%
Linux: 15.99%

Here's the browser summary:

IE: 45.78%
Mozilla: 29.35%
Safari: 11.79%
Opera: 4.44%

The referals on that day were 92.92% Slashdot.

Look at iTunes and the iPod... by YllabianBitPipe · 2004-02-13 05:19 · Score: 2, Interesting

eBooks can work, and will work as soon as someone gets all the pieces in place. The obvious model would be to follow Apple's iTunes / iPod. Make a hardware reader that has a great screen, light, and relatively inexpensive, and is a joy to use. Have it read as many formats as possible: HTML, RTF, Word Docs, don't dick around with DRM and proprietary formats. Have it read saved web pages. Have an internal hard drive. Next, have software on the computer that acts as a library much like iTunes. Make it easy to share and even read on your computer if need be, via a web browser.

Get all this crap in place and you will make a mint. Sell the books for 99 cents even. Heck I bet Apple is already working on this (They do audio books).

REALLY hi-res... and also the Mac by geekplus · 2004-02-13 05:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

Two things:

1. While I haven't seen it myself, a professor of mine in college got a chance at some research lab who did display/rendering work to read a document rendered on-screen at 600 DPI (yes, six HUNDRED)! That's the exact same density as the pages your printer typically spits out. Consumer systems at the moment do what, somewhere between 72 and 96DPI on-screen? He said that all of his objections about eye-strain completely vanished in a moment.

2. Even for those of us who won't have access to on-screen densities in the 600 DPI range for another 20 years -- if you haven't looked at font-rendering on a Mac in the last 5 years -- do yourself the favor! I hadn't done so in several years and the quality of fonts on the Mac is stunning, even (especially?) on their laptops. When I turned back to my own computer (someone had brought in a new Powerbook at work), my eyes instantly started tearing up. It really bothered me to look at my own screen for the next 5 minutes.

Eye See the Problem... by al!ethel · 2004-02-13 05:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

One of the big problems I have had with the idea of e-books is that there is no agreement in the industry on how we should accomplish the sale and distribution of those texts. I am a fan of the Safari website, but I know that I can't get those books for offline reading. I like to download some books for Microsoft Reader, but I know that I might not always be able to access that book, and have no guarentee that I will be able to read it on more than one computer.

E-books are a wonderful tool for research and to help some unknown authors get works out to the public, but with the uproar that MP3's have made, I can't forsee any publisher really pushing to make this a force of format. It reminds me of a technology that is very useful, user friendly, easy to produce and even fun to use, but is sidelined because the people that could make it happen are too afraid to step on any toes.

The one thing that I fear about this, though, is a format being pushed forward and then patented and soon, you end up basically paying another tax, just to read a book, because the format is locked in stone. What happens when all of the works of Shakespear are now avaliable for $19.95, and only from Adobe GreatWorks(TM).

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If I could get a firm grip on reality, I'd choke it...

TabletPC's make e-books workable by greywar · 2004-02-13 05:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

Seriously-my palm zire 71 was just too small [although for reading in the bathtub it can't be beat]. But my motion tabletpc works great for this. the screen is big enough, and its among the lighter tablets-meaning its truly workable for reading with. My favorite author sold a hardback book with a CD of all of his older books-I was in heaven. You can even read comic books without the size relationship being distorted. They have a close out fo older motion m1200's going on for like $1300. yeah its spendy-but it truly makes e-books worthwhile, and reading is one of my major hobbies. Not to mention you can go out on your porch at night, grab a soda and surf the net under the stars.

artists and compensation and chump change by rjnagle · 2004-02-13 05:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

This is an exceptionally fine piece, and I greatly enjoyed reading it.

Some impressions:

Although I'm happy that Mr. Doctorow has made a profit off his creative commons releases, I have a feeling that his case is an exception rather than the rule, and that once the the novelty value of creative commons content released by commercial publishers die down fewer people will be inclined to try first, buy later. (That is not worse than the status quo however). As pda's and ereaders become more user friendly, the temptation not to buy the hard copy will become irresistable for creative commons works.

I advocate a tip-based model of artistic compensation http://www.geocities.com/bigbadlinux/. Perhaps voluntary "pay-what-you-want" scenario is unrealistic, but compensation becomes viable when the pricepoint is low enough to seem insignificant.

A few years ago, memberships to porn sites cost 30-50$ a month; nowadays even most of them offer 1 day or 1 week memberships for gigabytes of movies. One could use emule to get these things, but when the price point starts resembling chump change, that's when people start voluntarily paying for online content.

If you look at this audio book site, for example http://www.audiobooksforfree.com/screen_main.asp?g g=1&mg=2
downloading mp3 audios for entire novels cost only about $5. That's close to the level of chump change.

Right now POD books easily sell for $10-12, but 100% virtual content could probably go for $2-3. Content needs to be priced in a way that appears to be chump change for the buyer/reader but gains enough readership for chump change to add up to something substantial. Fortunately, the existence of weblogs like www.maudnewton.com and viral marketing make it easier to get your content out there.

The future is weblogs people.

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Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston

Is Open Source Fertile Ground for Foul Play? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 05:30 · Score: 1, Interesting

The following quote from the talk is a good rebuttal to that idiot from yesterday's slashdot Is Open Source Fertile Ground for Foul Play?

Luther Bibles were a lot less trustworthy than the illuminated
numbers. Anyone with a press could run one off, subbing in any
apocryphal text he wanted -- and who knew how accurate that
translation was? Monks had an entire Papacy behind them, running
a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
for centuries.

Another great eBook application... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-13 05:40 · Score: 1, Interesting

Cookbooks. Ever tried to look for that recipe you made a while back that had the same 3 ingredients you happen to have in the fridge today that you need to use or they'll go bad? I sure have. And with a 1.5m shelf full of cookbooks, odds are, I won't find it. I'd gladly pay extra to get eBook versions of these cookbooks along with the paper copies. It's like many people have said--the paper copies are more pleasant for browsing and pleasure reading, but you can't beat eBooks for searching.

adeu,
Mateu

(Posting anonymously because I've already moderated here)

Re:This is totally offtopic...but by JonnyCalcutta · 2004-02-13 05:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Those are pretty geeky stats. I manage a lot of commercial sites and we consistantly get 95% IE on 95% Windows. Less than 50% of users on IE is a huge deviation from the norm.
I don't know if you were intending otherwise since you didn't comment.

PORN QUALITY==getting worse by rjnagle · 2004-02-13 05:50 · Score: 2, Interesting

to further use the porn example, the lowering of price of online porn has NOT resulted in a decrease in porn quality. I realize this is a subjective opinion, but I think the same effect will apply to many kinds of content, not just porn.

Therefore, when I say, wait until the price point becomes chump change, I am not implying that reduction in price implies a reduction in content standards. It may not even imply a reduction in compensation for creators. (It really is amazing how many things we can learn about content just by looking at the porn issue).

btw, an essay I wrote about online types of adult entertainment: Pleasure Manifesto (work safe).

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Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston

Off Topic, but I'm curious by CGP314 · 2004-02-13 05:58 · Score: 2, Interesting

While releasing his books under a creative commons license worked well for him I wonder what would happen if a normal (read unfamous) person attempted the same thing. Would a CC license help an unknown writer or hurt their chances of getting a book deal?

older books by pruss · 2004-02-13 06:38 · Score: 3, Interesting

I think that more than half of my reading, apart from what I read to prepare for class, is older books that I can get in ebook format and that are in the public domain. The only things I like paper books more for is being able to read in the bathtub (oh, for a waterproof Clie), ease of marginal annotation, and ability to flip through quickly (my Clie screen is too small to find things quickly by flipping through).

Searching is helpful. Having a book in one's pocket always is great. Some of the things I read are parts of enormous multi-volume sets that I wouldn't have room on a bookshelf for. For instance, dozens of volumes of Cardinal Newman or of the Jesuit Relations. Various classic books, too, are greatly improved by hyperlinking. For instance, Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae which has lots of back-references.

At one point my wife claimed to find it to be more fun to read in ebook format on a Clie NX60/70 (using Plucker) than to read the dead-tree editions. Autoscrolling was particularly nice when our baby was small and we had no hands free while doing things for the baby.

And, yes, it's nice to have a big library with one. I've got some 600mb of flash on my NX70. It's expensive, but when one considers the cost of printed books, it's not so bad. (For instance, I bet the complete works of Cardinal Newman would set me back a couple of hundred dollars in print format for the books themselves, and more when one considers the cost of another bookcase.) I just wish everybody published in ebook format. Then I wouldn't have to buy physical books almost at all.

Re:This is totally offtopic...but by orthogonal · 2004-02-13 07:30 · Score: 2, Interesting

I site I administer got Slashdotted back in December. The story was posted on a Sunday.

Here's the platform summary for that day:

1. Geeks are also more likely to lie in their HTTP User-Agent header, either to work around sites that petulantly detect the browser and refuse to function if they don't like it (like my bank, which works fine in Moz* but insists it doesn't), or to frustrate sites that attempt exploits based n the browser, or just for the hell of it.

2. I run Windows 2K. But I consider myself a more or less linux user, because do a lot of work in bash running under cygwin, and I'm trying to get coLinux up and running. Using Windows or linux is not political activity for me; I use what is most convenient to me, and Windows makes for a decent GUI experience, especially if you replace all Windows apps with Open source equivalents.

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Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?

Zaurus as reader by FromWithin · 2004-02-13 08:52 · Score: 2, Interesting

My Zaurus SL-C750 has completely changed the way I read. I'm starting to get really annoyed by the physicality of real books now, in the same way that my jukebox MP3 player has made me get annoyed with CDs. There is an excellent reader program which reads all sorts of formats (including Plucker and AportisDoc), and the smooth text scrolling is supremely smooth because of the 640x480 display. And of course, I can use it in portrait or landscape mode (when the screen is rotated, the display auto-rotates).

It's so much better having a small, compact auto-scrolling backlit display to read from. Holding a book and turning pages is annoying.

Re:"less restrictive" is not honest by SFEley · 2004-02-13 08:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

Didn't Sony get into trouble with this issue regarding Underworld?

They didn't get into trouble; White Wolf and one of their short story authors tried to make trouble, saying "Vampire-on-werewolf action? Been done!" Their brief was pretty thin on the ground, IMO, basically implying that these cliches were White Wolf's invention when it was obvious both sources were drawing from a common pool of cliches. WW failed to get their injunction in court, and it all went nowhere.

That said, the rest of your post is pretty much on-target. Derivatives are strictly controlled under copyright law, and fan fiction is not legal unless the copyright holder explicitly says it is. You can't copyright an idea, but pretty much everything related to a specific expression of an idea is under the creator's control until he gives it away or sells it.

(This is what bugs me when people start railing off about the evils of copyright. It's not an us-vs.-them situation. Open licenses like the GPL and Creative Commons are not against copyright in any way; they're explicit contracts transferring the creator's rights to his expression. Without copyright law these licenses would have no force nor meaning whatsoever.)

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ESCAPE POD - The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine

Re:Books are more than words by jtev · 2004-02-13 10:21 · Score: 2, Interesting

Hmm, well, let me see, I'm an avid reader (about 50 books per year) my pda cost me about $200 and lasts me about a year (ok I'm abusive to it) I make sure to keep buying PDAs that use the same memory. Now, between the baen free library, the varios baen cds, and baen webscriptions I've read more books thanks to having my PDA, and as a side effect, I have a place to keep my checkbook, (good thing) keep my schedule, and track people I know. and it tells me when I'm suposed to do things. Between savings on books and savings on overdraft charges, the PDA pays for itself in about 3 months.

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That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil

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Doctorow: Ebooks Neither E Nor Books

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