Your experience of e-books

[binkie]

(07-03-2011 07:46 PM)picard1109 Wrote:  Are you also investigating things like agency pricing of e-books by publishers, which can often make the e-book more expensive than the hard copy?

Oh, you bet!

I have a terrifyingly lengthy list of sticking points and demands. Principal among them (once I get past all the value-for-money requirements) is the matter of artificial scarcity, which dictates that we must buy more than one copy of a document if we want to be able to offer clean access to it. The insistence of e-book vendors that their product should be treated for content management purposes as though it is a tangible object is plainly ridiculous. As is the requirement that we buy a number of uses, then buy some more, as though we might wear out the file

HarperCollins recently instituted a requirement that all its e-books be replaced after 26 downloads, as this (they concluded for no defensible reason that any sane person can discern) is the number of times a book can be loaned before it must be replaced. That's an interesting parallel world they inhabit at HarperCollins

Pricing structures and issues of concurrent access are my life for the next six months