I refuse to use proprietary distribution formats because it locks you
into one vendor. Baen Books, a publisher of Science Fiction offers
their books in HTML format, (and a few others as well), but you can
read them in any browser, and they can't reach into your machine and
erase something you've already purchased. Not all of their catalog is
electronic of course, but a fare amount is, and they supply a number of
titles for reading on line or download for free in their free library.
I don't know if it's happened yet but if it hasn't it's only a matter of
time before someone hacks a kindel to produce unauthorized copies of
downloaded books, not because there's any money in it, but just to do it...
Graydon wrote:
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 11:06:28AM -0400, John Sessoms scripsit:
I think I'll stick with my old, beat up, dog eared paperbacks.
They get heavy.
E-paper, especially if they can get the refresh time down, is entirely
good enough as a reading surface, and having the one comms terminal to
read stuff on that happens to have an entire searchable ("you can't grep
dead goats") reference library *and* a couple hundred stuck-in-airports
books on it is very convenient.
There are even attractive things about not having to cut down trees to
publish a book. But hardly anyone currently in the book business is
seeing this as an opportunity rather than a problem. (Amazon sees it as
an opportunity to lock in an entire new sales channel, so that it will
be theirs forever.)
-- Graydon
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