Explore by tag: copyright

Followups to the ebooks ethical question

By tytso | Sun, Nov. 30 - 11:36 PM

From Thoughts by Ted »

When I have a moment, I’ll try to tally up the responses that I got to “An ethical question involving ebooks”and see if there are any interesting patterns based on self-identified generational markers.  Obviously, this is not a properly controlled survey, so the results aren’t going to mean much, but it is interesting that some fairly passionately written comments came from folks who self-identified as coming from generations that broke with the common stereotypes of their respective demographic groups.   If I were going to commission a study, one thing that I would almost certainly do is to ask pose a similar question about music and mp3’s, and do have the surveys asking the question about ebooks first, and half the surveys asking the questions about music first.  It would be interesting to see if (a) there is a difference in attitudes between music and books, and ...

Read more »

Posted under: copyright , musings , oss , science fiction | Comments »

An ethical question involving ebooks

By tytso | Sat, Nov. 29 - 4:48 AM

From Thoughts by Ted »

I recently purchased a short story from Fictionwise, which was not DRM’ed, so I could easily get it into a form where I could read it on my Sony eReader. Thanks to that short story, I was introduced to an author, and a character, which I found very engaging. When I decided to find out more about the character, I found that the author had written two additional short stories, and three additional novels many years ago, but has since stopped writing any more books involving that character. Furthermore, the novels have gone out of print, and are only available from amazon.com as used books.

Unfortunately, I travel a lot. So much so, that one of the few times that I have time to read is when I’m traveling. And I really dislike having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around; they take up far ...

Read more »

Posted under: copyright , musings , science fiction | Comments »