Digital Piracy Hits eBook Industry

[random50]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Nop, you can make like Spanish government (stimulated by SGAE: Spain Author General Society and CEDRO): we pay a fee at all these electronic devices and the entities collect the money "for the authors"

Doesn't that just make people think:

"I might as well pirate then. After all, I paid for it."?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Nop, you can make like Spanish government (stimulated by SGAE: Spain Author General Society and CEDRO): we pay a fee at all these electronic devices and the entities collect the money "for the authors"

Yeah? You pay a 'fee' to own and use them? Shades of the Soviet Union!

(Y'all know that's what PETN and AnFO were invented for, right? )

Derek

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by random50

Doesn't that just make people think:

"I might as well pirate then. After all, I paid for it."?

Hearing about such 'fees' (Really nothing more than taxation without representation.) makes me think about buying truckloads of canvas and quicklime.

Derek

[kacir]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

There's a VERY SIMPLE solution for all this. Make photocopiers, word processing apps (someone could, after all, sit there and type it in), screen capturers, OCR apps and digital cameras illegal to own or operate.

... been there, seen that ...

In the "good old socialistic era" only big companies had copiers and [later] faxes here in my country. If you wanted to have a few pages copied for a project documentation you had to go through complicated process of collecting permissions to make a copy. Only trustworthy party members were allowed to operate copying machines and they were closely monitored.
In Soviet Union every single typewriter was registered and every typewriter owner had to provide a sample of the text typed on machine for tracing of hand typed "illegal" books - called samizdat(s)

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by kacir

... been there, seen that ...

In the "good old socialistic era" only big companies had copiers and [later] faxes here in my country. If you wanted to have a few pages copied for a project documentation you had to go through complicated process of collecting permissions to make a copy. Only trustworthy party members were allowed to operate copying machines and they were closely monitored.
In Soviet Union every single typewriter was registered and every typewriter owner had to provide a sample of the text typed on machine for tracing of hand typed "illegal" books - called samizdat(s)

And, no matter what problems there may be now, I'll bet you're glad *that* is no longer in place, yes?

Derek

[kacir]

Originally Posted by barnacle

What I don't want:
...
- Carriage returns at the end of each line (what were you *thinking*, Gutenberg?)

At the time the Gutenberg standard was written the only type of computer terminals (understand displays) available to mere mortals were text terminals that had at best 80 characters per line. Line wrap that we consider one of fundamental features of modern applications for working with text was an exotic feature.
Even one of the best text editors of that time - vi - had only very limited support for long lines.

So the standard was set in a way that would enable anybody, with even lousiest equipment to read the book.

My very first computer had a 40 character text line and an average e-book would fit in several of 170kB one-sided 5 1/4 inch flopy disks (not that I had such luxury. I had to use magneto-phone cassettes (15 minutes of loading for 64kB document))


By the way, PocketBook reader can reformat "plain, vanilla text" Gutemberg books automatically. It will run lines in paragraph together (and will add spaces between words where necessary) and will make paragraphs only if:
- there is empty line between paragraphs
- the first line of paragraph is indented by a few spaces or tabs

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by random50

Doesn't that just make people think:

"I might as well pirate then. After all, I paid for it."?

YEEEEES, it does.

[fugazied]

Main problem from piracy and the shoddy way media companies are dealing with it (suing grandmothers, harassing paying users with dodgy DRM).

They risk alienating the younger audience who do NOT have the recollection or habit of going into a record store to buy a record/cd/tape or going into a bookstore to buy a physical book. Young people are used to downloading things for free, they don't see the value of virtual items in the way that the older generation does because we associate it to the physical items we used to buy.