Borrowing eBooks, The Pitfall of eReaders
Borrowing eBooks is the number one excuse I hear from people on why they refuse to make the switch to an eReader. You can easily borrow paper books from your friends or even go to a used book store and pick up great books on the cheap. Publishers insistence that if they allow people to borrow eBooks chaos will ensue is ridiculous. I can understand the need to put restrictions on people’s ability to borrow eBooks, but the current restriction of one time for 14 days is a bit tight. Not everybody has the free time to breeze through a 1000 page book like Pillars of the Earth. It really wouldn’t change things for the publisher to extend that to 30 days.
While I’d like to see the ability for more than one person to borrow an eBook I can understand it to a degree. Paper books are restricted by location and who you know. This doesn’t apply to eBooks, therefore somebody could create a site like Lend eBooks and people could continually lend out the same eBook over and over again. I can see how if that site grew big enough it could water down the market. I do however feel it would be fair to allow somebody 2 or 3 borrows. If you get the majority of the population onto eBooks then you cut a major cost in printing, you also cut down the market on used book stores. People could deal with that if they could pay a touch less for eBooks than they did paper ones, and if they could more easily borrow eBooks. Kudos to Barnes and Nobles for starting the trend with their Nook and allowing people to borrow eBooks. Their system isn’t perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Bruce has 4 posts & 0 comments