This leads me to buying books twice, first as an ebook and second in print to loan. Whilst publishers may well like this, it's scummy behaviour if they do and scummy business practices always come back and bite you eventually.
Or alternatively I never buy the ebook because I want the print book to loan, but the print is too expensive so I never buy either...
I think "case based reasoning" is going on. We have no problems loaning books out to friends because we always have. But pirating a copy is considered unethical, even though the net effect on the publisher is the same. One can argue that the former is slightly better because the both of us can't read it at the same time, but in my view we're just rationalizing.
That has always been the reasoning. Ebooks are not considered property. You are licensed a nontransferable copy of the book.
> One can argue that the former is slightly better because the both of us can't read it at the same time, but in my view we're just rationalizing.
With books, most of us just lend books when we're done reading them. It's rare where both need to read at the same time, although (I guess) that can happen.
My greater point is that we, as a society, are perfectly comfortable lending books out to friends or having public libraries simply because we've grown up doing it that way. In an alternative universe, if public libraries or paper books were invented today, most people (especially intellectual property lawyers) would view it as a form of intelletual property theft and consider those things "morally wrong". Not that I'm saying that's right or wrong, it's just that people have a tendency to understand the present in terms of the past (case-based reasoning).
One just needs to stay honest and don't spread those ebooks around.
I seldom buy anything from Amazon, although I own a Kindle.
Sorry can only up vote once.
I buy technical e-books from oreilly, informit, springer or nostarchpress.
They are more often than not, cheaper than amazon and you can download them in various formats, including but not limited to pdf.
Buying books for Kindle feels like you're renting them from Amazon.
And backup? What does that even mean for a paper book? Photocopy? EBooks are in the cloud; you can never actually lose one forever. Just buy it again, which is very, very likely to be cheaper than photocopying a paper book.
Just saying.
In 2012 I bought some music in electronic format from Amazon. A bit later they introduced the Amazon music service. I looked in my purchased music section, and the music I'd bought in 2012 wasn't there, and if I lose the downloaded files it's not available to me unless I buy it again or the rights holders come to some agreement with Amazon.
It's possible that stuff will drop out of the cloud when the rights become impossible to work out. I'm not sure how likely that is with books, but it happens with films. The most well known is "Point Break", which now can't be shown in public by cinemas because no-one knows who owns the rights.
And sure we're not quite there yet - the entire library of congress isn't online yet. But we all imagine its going to end up there, no contest.
The real issue is, does e-book loss (losing rights) compare unfavorably with real book loss (loaned out and forgotten; burned or discarded; degraded to unusability)?
Loaned books and not returned: same thing with files if cloud service will ever let you do that and you can't make a copy for yourself. However they could let us set an automatic return date. That will solve the problem. The point is: why bother if they won't make money out of it? Pay a little fee to borrow or to lend?
Accidentally burned vs accidentally deleted: same thing. Only the ability of backing them up is going to save you. Or a cloud service unless we are ruling it out for the rights issue.
Degradation: hard to say. Ebooks haven't been around for enough time to say how many of them I could lose in the next years. However I still have files from the mid 90s so if one really cares about them it's probably safe to say that they won't be lost. I can probably read some cassettes and floppy disks from the early and mid 80s if I bother to switch on their original hw (and if it works). However it's a vastly larger pain than reading an old book on aged paper. My parents have some of those books from the early 20th century and we can read them. Obviously they might have thrown away other books and it won't be the case if those books were bits.
Still: without cloud services are we going to be able to read epub or mobi in a 100 years? And with cloud services how many books won't be available anymore by then because of policies, politics, commercial rights, censorship?
unless ANYTHING happens to that part of the cloud. In which case, you've lost your entire collection forever.
And you can also have a fire at your house. Which is quite a bit more likely?
1) I can send an ebook as a gift. AFAIK Amazon allows that only in the USA.
2) I can backup my ebooks and move them to other readers I own.
I suspect that #1 and #2 are related, technically and in the business model.