Electronic books

[Dottiepo]

Why aren’t more books published to be purchased and downloaded? I can find Jesus of Nazareth but that is about it. I would like to purchase and download Fr. Groshel (sorry for the spelling) and Ralph Martin’s books.

It seems like the format is already there in the normal print publishing, so I don’t understand why it would not be easy sales for those of us that don’t want the paper, just the text?

They can control music, why not ebooks?

I don’t feel like purchasing a Kindle at $399, although that looks interesting.

Thanks for any (name removed by moderator)ut!

 

[Benedictus]

Several reasons, I suppose.

Most people don’t like reading a lot of text off a computer screen; although, the Kindle would (at first) seem to be a good alternative. Unfortunately, the Kindle (IMO) will never really take off because it is expensive and Amazon puts far too many restrictions on what a consumer can do with the books they download. For example, a reader can’t transfer or sell the ebook to someone else like they could with a regular book. They can’t even use the ebook on a second Kindle or their computer. Even iTunes lets you put your songs on up to 5 devices. The ebooks you “buy” for the Kindle aren’t that much cheaper than the paper versions, and you keep all your usual rights as a consumer when you buy the paper version.

I was excited when I first heard about the Kindle, but my enthusiasm was quickly crushed when I heard that it was laden with all the usual DRM **** that I probably should have expected.

 

[Stolen_Rutters]

DRM - It’s hard to justify buying something that can’t be transferred from machine to machine, especially when a normal hard-drive-on-a-computer has a mean time to data loss (MTDL) failure in the 3- to 5-years range… (nobody designs storage devices with MTDL over 10 years, since it is expected to be obsolete by then.) A normal book can make it 15 years easy, if it’s taken care of. If you want to compare “long lasting” versions of e-books (if they exist) to regular books, remember that the more expensive non-acid paper books can last a lifetime or three.

On the positive side, e-books will be guaranteed repeat sales for the vendor. (New format = New sale)

edit - hmm, I just realized that a paperback is a book that isn’t expected to last… like an e-book. So I guess you would compare e-book prices to a paperback price instead of a hard cover price, and make your decision based on that price metric.