Piracy on the E-Book Ocean - Debbie Bennett
Have I ranted about free books before? I promise I won't again. I know that offering your books free works for a lot of people, so who am I to argue? What do you mean I always argue - with anybody, about anything? But the free I want to talk about now is the unintentionally free. The rip-off free. The pirating free. The illegal free. If I buy a paperback book, I own that book as a physical entity - the paper it's printed on and the physical copy of the story on its pages. I don't own the content of the book. The story itself remains the property of the author and I've just bought the right to read it as often as I like. And lend it to other people too. But ebooks don't have a physical presence. An ebook is a digital file stored on a server somewhere. When I buy an ebook, I buy the right to download it to a reading device and read it as often as I like. The fact that Amazon apparently has the right to remove it from my device without warning or compensation i...