This Book Will Self-Destruct In 10 Hours 437
extrarice writes: "See here
The "rent-a-book" concept is here. Pay a buck, and you're allowed to read for a cumulative total of 10 hours. After that, the text is inaccessible (unless you somehow access the content you purchased...)"
Re:Thomas Jefferson (Score:4, Interesting)
We need more people helping little old ladies across the street. Let's offer a million dollar reward for doing this. It will be expensive, but it complies with your logic. To turn it around, if the reward were already established policy and I advocated repealing it, you'd point out that this reduction in incentive would lead to a reduction in the desired behavior (helping little old ladies across the street).
On another note, it is the investor's job to make his investment profitable, not mine. I suggest investing in things people are willing to buy, rather than investing first and then seeking legal protection to make your investment feasible.
Watch it go the way of DivX (Score:2, Interesting)
First, this is going the way of DivX; nobody in their right mind is going to pay to read a book for a short period. People pay for books they want to keep permanently; for temporary trial reading, they borrow books from the free public library. As far as I can tell, they've just thought of a new way to prove that e-books are not profitable.
Second, is it just me or were they extraordinarily stupid to release their timed ebook in Adobe E-book format right after Elcomsoft's Advanced E-book Processor has been heavily publicized in every geek-oriented news channel on the Internet? What are they saying here, "Crack me! Crack me!"?
Third, making available preview e-book versions of a novel is effective marketing--if it's free. Baen Books [baen.com] has been making the first chapters of new books available for on-line preview for quite a while now, as well as making the first books of some popular series available in their entirety for free--apparently it's been an effective enough marketing tactic that they have expanded their list of free e-books. That's right, expanded! Now, can anyone tell me how effective that would have been if they charged a $1 fee for a short reading period per book in the Baen Free Library [baen.com]?
Do publishers actually think when they come up with these schemes, or did the geniuses that came up with dot.bomb business plans move into publishing when I wasn't looking?
Your Local Library (Score:2, Interesting)
hmmm (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to get around this, but that took me all of about 2 seconds to come up with a way to defeat this.
Keep trying, copyright whores.
-J5K
Don't make me laugh (Score:2, Interesting)
Maskirovka
Div for books (Score:4, Interesting)
Divx failed because it just wasn't convenient enough for the price ($100 more for a compatible DVD player, and you still had to go to a store for the discs), but this rent-a-book concept doesn't suffer the same problem if the books can simply be downloaded.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. If the rent-a-book concept succeeds, that means that renting bits (CD's? software?) might catch on again; if it fails, then don't expect to see anything else become rentable on your computer in the next few years.
The Right to Read... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html [gnu.org]
I'm a whore.
Re:Don't make me laugh (Score:5, Interesting)
When will content publishers realize that security/encryption isn't worth a damn when the end party is NOT TRUSTED. Guess what? If I can read/view/hear it on my computer, there is a way of capturing it, and re-releasing it with no protection. This simple fact will never change. And yet the industries will waste countless millions of dollars trying to invent secure delivery/viewer systems, which is a complete fool's crusade.
The only answer is to add enough value, that consumers are willing to pay the money to avoid the hassle. What these guys are doing is ADDING MORE hassle, and no real added value.
Hacked/Cracked (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me get this straight:
Yep, sounds good to me. Not! Being a Luddite, I'll do just fine reading what's already been published on paper if this actually were to take off. Unfortunately, one of the first big markets for this crap is already a captive audience: college students [slashdot.org] . If you think this topic doesn't fit into YRO, you haven't been watching the direction things are headed.
Re:OMG!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
The great thing is this quote by Kurt Vonnegut
From the Los Angeles Times article on Ebooks [latimes.com].
Re:digital != analog (Score:2, Interesting)
You can take your "master" 35 mm film shots, blow 'em up to 8.5x11 and photocopy in an unlimited fashion (your time, and to a certan extent, money, limit you, just as with digitally copying an ebook). With today's high speed copiers the entire city could have the book in no time. It takes quite a few generations for photocopies to be unreadable...
Besides, you'd be surprised how many generations an SVHS master [or, per a previous slashdot discussion, Betacam master