Concerns about eBooks

By
Elijah Rotholtz
– January 4, 2011Posted in: Technology

eBooks are a wonderful way to quickly and easily read books. You can pretty much find any book you want on one of the eBook stores. Right now the iPad has the most books available to it – the iPad has at least four major name-brand bookstores. While eBooks are useful, they aren’t exactly good. The publishers sell the book at a lower than normal price, which in turn often results in less money to the author. There are also concerns over the “ownership” of a book. When you purchase a book you own it, you can tear it up if you hate it, you can write in it, you can even loan it to a friend, or even better you can sell it or donate it to charity. With eBooks almost none of that is possible. You can’t sell an eBook after you’re done with it. You can’t tear up an eBook, you can’t loan it to a friend (at least for more than 14 days). The only thing you can do it mark it up, and even then it’s not the same thing. You don’t own the book. You can’t photo–copy it. You can only do what the eBook publishers allow you to do.

So my question is: are eBooks really the way of the future? Personally, I think the only type of eBook that is acceptable is the expired one. The books who’s authors’ copyright has run out. These books are available all over the Internet, whether it’s on Project Gutenberg or Poetry.org. If it’s already available to the masses for free… then why not?

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About Elijah Rotholtz