Reply #13: But TV wasn't replacing anything. [View All]

[Lyric]

There was nothing lost when the age of television dawned. That's not true with Kindles/Nooks. BOOKS will be lost--or at least the inexpensive/free used variety. Can you "donate" a book from your Kindle? Even the technology becomes more affordable, the poorest of the poor will STILL not be able to afford it, perhaps for decades.

You have no idea how much poor people depend on this cheap/free books from thrift stores and libraries. It was easy for publishing companies to acquiesce to the idea of public libraries and secondhand bookstores; once those physical books were purchased, there wasn't much they could do to stop it even if they'd *wanted* to. They couldn't exactly make physical books self-destructing, after all--someone could get hurt, and then they'd get sued. But e-books? They can easily put a stop to free/secondhand e-books. They're already doing it with some library e-books; you only get to "read" the book X number of times before the file disables itself. E-book files can be programmed to self-obliterate, and there is nothing the reader can do to stop it.

I know it's convenient. I get that. But this is going to cause major problems down the road. It allows publishing companies waaaay too much control over reading material, and it's going to put an enormous burden on poor people...as if they don't have enough burdens already. Imagine how pissed you're going to be someday when you have to keep purchasing the same books, movies, and music over and over and over again because the old physical formats are mostly gone, the file variety is all you have left, and all of those files are programmed to disable/obliterate themselves after a certain number of "loads".

We WILL regret this.