What's inside the evrit reader?

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, May 30, 2010, guy keren wrote about "Re: What's inside the evrit reader?":
> just the way that in the paper-world there were books sales and there 
> were book loans together - they may be several such models that will 
> evolve around the internet.

I agree, both book selling and book loaning are valid, but ever since the
invention of the printing press allowed cheap book reproduction, civilization
had several hundreds of years to understand the two business models, and
I believe the difference between them is very clear to the consumers - starting
with what you can legally do with books you bought vs. rented, and ending with
how much you expect to pay on buying vs. renting a book. The invention of the
internet doesn't change any of these expectations - it just adds new
expectations (e.g., that you can put 2000 books in a tiny device instead of
in a room full of shelves).

However, since clearly nobody has ever come up with a method of *selling*
ebooks, I'd hope they stick to *loaning* ebooks and stop pretending they are
actually selling them.

By "coming up with a method of selling ebooks" I mean coming up with a method
which guarantees that you can move your book to other devices in the future
(this is the complete opposite of e-vrit, whose agreement specifically warns
you that you can never move your books to a device from another maker),
and guarantees that you can sell/loan/give your book to someone else.

> personally, i tend to re-read the same book again and again in a period 
> of much less then 10 years - so for me, a model that allows me to keep 
> the book longer then a week or two (as is the case with libraries today) 
> makes sense.

So basically you're looking to *buy* the book, but don't care if it tears
apart after a few years. This is similar to buying a cheaper book with
a cheaper binding and paper in the real world ;-)

> you should note that in the paper library model, books has to be 
> returned fast, because the library couldn't keep unlimited number of 
> copies of each book - all this logistics needed for a paper-library are 
> not relevant to electronic libraries - and imposing such a model on 
> electronic libraries will be artificial.

Everything you're saying just says why an e-library should be even cheaper
than a library - not more expensive!

Imagine that you had a real-time library, where every time want to pick up
some book, instantaneously you can check it out and start reading it. 5
minutes later you can stop reading this book, and check out a different one.
At any time you can be holding just one book (which makes sense), but you can
switch the book you're holding every 5 minutes, or every 5 weeks. You'll be
paying a small monthly fee (like in most libraries). When you stop paying
for subscription, you can't read any of the books you previously had access
to - you did not buy them.

Netflix did something very similar for the movie world, and it is working
great for them and their customers.

> so the real problem you have now, is your ability (or lack of) to loan 
> the book to friends or sell them as "used books". note that since they 
> are not "used" - you should be able to sell them in list-price to anyone 
> (perhaps a little less - because the buyer has to work harder to buy the 
> book from you, then to buy it from an online reseller - until someone 
> will build a "used e-books market" web site). i don't see exactly how to 
> overcome this, without 'ruining' the industry (with the used-paper-books 
> market, people had an incentive to buy the new book from the publisher 
> rather then the used book, both due to convenience, and because the new 
> book was in a better condition). by the way, i won't be surprised if 
> originally, selling used books was considered illegal ;)

If you think this will ruin the industry, then this is yet another reason
they should switch to the "library" model, where this problem doesn't
exist.

> look at the parallel market - the proprietary software market - selling 
> used software is deemed illegal according to many software licenses (and 
> the fact it, the software is not sold - only the license to use it). and 
> yet people live with this market for a long time - although very many 
> people break the law daily - which shows the model is not working too 
> well. but then again - radio-tapes and radio-disks in cars were stolen 
> in large percentages for years - and still no one thought the underlying 
> model should be changed :0

The difference is that only sociopaths, a tiny percentage of the population,
ever stole car stereos, while the vast majority of the population have had to,
at least once in their life, "bend" the rules on software copying, music
copying, etc., because they are indeed impossible to live with. Everybody
I know who ever bought legal software, CDs, DVDs, games, etc., considers to
be the owner of this physical media, and wouldn't care if the license say
they cannot be resold.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Sunday, May 30 2010, 17 Sivan 5770
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |You may only be one person to the world,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |but may also be the world to one person.