Re:Are paper books really disappearing?
by steveeq1 on Monday January 25, 2016 @03:39PM
(#10969767)
Yeah, I covered this:
> 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 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).