You’ve hit the nail on the head there: convenience. It’s all about the ease of use vs the ease of piracy. Before Napster – hell, before the late 1990s – it was possible to steal music, just not easy. You had to know someone with the original CD/tape and had to have the technical know-how to rip the CD (before all media players had this built-in), or you had to know someone on IRC (and IRC brought with it a learning curve), etc. You had to work at it. Shit, you could have been sharing gi-normous WAV files in the 80′s, if you had the patience and the technical knowledge. With Napster and the programs that followed, you didn’t have to know or talk to anyone: a hermit man in a cave – with a modem – could be downloading Metallica music in a few minutes.

While piracy was difficult, it was almost non-existent. Once it got easy to crack DVDs (took some geeks), compress them (powerful-enough CPUs), share them (wide-spread broadband or cheap CDs), piracy ramped up. With music, same thing: a compression algorithm (MP3) and broadband met, and now it was easier to download an album than trudge all the way to the store to buy it. Once iTunes and whatever other stores took their heads out of their asses and began offering what the public WANTED (they could have just looked at Napster and seen what we wanted: instant music that we could play anywhere), piracy once again became a more difficult proposition for a large number of people. I mean, what non-technical person is going to scour torrent sites for a good quality version of an album when they can toss a few bucks at the problem?

Something relevant: http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

I think Amazon has a real chance, though they do have to bow to the publishers right now: if we don’t go with the 14 days and selective-sharing nonsense, the publishers aren’t going to sign off on the books. And what we need at this moment is more available books. Even with DRM. Once all the publishers are heavily invested in ebooks and lulled into a false-security with DRM, we yank the rug out from under them. Just as with music. Once Amazon and Zune began offering MP3 versions of songs, Apple had no choice. There was only one way to stay competitive. And now it’s all DRM-free.

Publishers are INCREDIBLY old fashioned, in thinking and in practices. They’re still convinced that book piracy will… OK, nevermind, I’m just gonna write up this rant in a post.

True, the bargains on PHYSICAL books are (for some reason) unbeatable. And yes, only reading e-books (like I do) is a limiting and an expensive decision. But I guess that’s the price I pay for convenience.

Sure, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to resort to piracy (as publishers would term it), but take this example: if a book (or, in this case, 4 books) is available for the Kindle but not for the Sony Reader, and I really want to read them on my Reader, I’m really left without legal options.

The e-book industry started later than the mp3 industry, it has to go through the same growing pains. Like the multitude of formats and not all content not available from all “publishers”. And of course the book publishers are even more old-fashioned and terrified of technology/piracy than the music industry.

But yeah, make the leap. I (obviously) have few regrets. For one thing, my current version of REAMDE weighs considerably less than the 3lb hardcover version. But, not all content you want is available for the Kindle: some books are available in non-Kindle formats; some are not available in the states (had to steal a UK version of an e-book, though I did buy a dead-tree copy as well); some are just plain not available in e-book format.

Speaking of DRM, removing the oxymoronic “rights” is MUCH easier for e-books than for music. For one, the content-size ratio is much better. 2, all the major formats are already cracked. 3, there are simple, easy-to-use, BATCH tools to convert content. 4, yes, I am actually advocating cracking DRM. As one of my new coworkers stated it, “I refuse to pay twice for the same content.” Kinda agree with that, as per comments above. (Even though I did buy like 9 copies of “Replay” so far, and chances are high that I’ll buy more in the future.)

I got the Reader waaaay back before there was a Kindle. And I haven’t upgraded to a Kindle for a number of reasons*, chief among them is the fact that the Sony Reader is still working.

The new Kindle, however, might be a worthwhile purchase: they’ve done away with the keyboard and it now has a touch interface. Not to mention the fact that my Reader has been having battery issues for a while now. Oh, and of course, as you alluded to it, I should be drinking the new Kool-Aid.

*I was never really sold on having an e-book reader with dozens of buttons when I really only use three (power, next, bookmark). The internet is a nice feature, sure, but an e-reader is not the best platform for viewing websites, especially since my phone’s always connected. As for ordering books over the air, there’s usually a bit of thought that goes into my reading choices, so the argument of being to start reading in 30 seconds, without a computer, doesn’t work on me. The different collections of books is a bit of argument (and, in me, gives rise to a number of rants on ebook availability, not to mention quality), but not a real one since it’s so easy to strip the DRM. And I have no moral qualms in that area: I’ve bought the book and I’ll damn well read it on whatever device I want to.