What's inside the evrit reader?

[geoffrey mendelson]

On May 30, 2010, at 5:16 PM, guy keren wrote:

>
> 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 ;)


Not funny. Books existed for thousands of years, and copyrights only  
have existed for around 130. Many places did not have copyrights, and  
some still don't,
e.g. Saudi Arabia.

The difference between paper books and eBooks, is even with today's  
technology, it's difficult and expensive to reproduce a book, while  
you can place an ebook on one of the filesharing sites, e.g.  
rapidshare, and thousands of people can download it in a day. Books  
also have the added feature of being a physical thing, which follows  
the established rules of ownership.

As for eBooks, while the next Harry Potter type fiction sensation will  
be copyright probably into the next century, I don't care. I want an  
ebook reader for the several gigabytes of electronics (specificaly  
radio) books that are either out of copyright, or never were that I  
have, and probably 100 times that if I ever get around to downloading  
them.

As for DRM, IMHO the secret of iTunes was the DRM, which made the  
music producers happy. At 99 cents each file, no one really cares if  
they can't give it away or sell it, since the DRM was unobtrusive. You  
could move it to and from your iPod, to a different iPod or computer,  
with no trouble. And ITunes had a rescue system. If you lost your  
entire collection, they could enable a complete download of everything  
you bought from them.

At 40-80 NIS a read, I doubt that many people will buy books. People  
in the US will pay those prices because that's the cost of a movie  
ticket and they still go to the movies. Israeli's don't, the local  
multiplex movie theater closed down and is now a clothing store. :-(

Geoff.

-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge  
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the  
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found  
in the Wikipedia.