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Crippled e-books[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#19)
by baldguy on Tue Dec 02, 2003 at 11:34:28 AM PDT

While I agree that e-books have not made the inroads that could be have been made, I think it is more of a problem with the delivery method rather than the encryption.

Who wants to read a book off a computer? Your eyes will be strained. The retention rate is about 35% less than reading off paper. Older people are less comfortable with it. The people that would jump on adoption, mainly 13-30 year olds, do not want to spent hundreds of dollars on a "reader" that may be dropped or abused by the kids.

You have to give the device the "day at the beach" test. If you can read it at the beach and it can survive the sand and sun, you've got a winner.

Although nobody has stumbled upon the perfect combination of copyright restrictions and encryption, there must be some limit on how you distribute the information. While there are legal limits on what you can do with a book, it is still possible to steal the content. You just need to put it on a copy machine with reasonable paper, then cut down the pages, then bind the book. It makes duplication difficult. No such barriers are in place with digital data. If there were no restrictions on copying these books, each publisher would sell at least 90% less, as everybody would freely distribute the content. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

-baldguy

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l;kl;k;l[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#44)
by Anonymous User on Mon Nov 13, 2006 at 07:40:35 AM PDT

kl;kl;k

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License Revocation | 28 comments (28 topical) | Post A Comment
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