Would you pay twice for the same book?

It's funny to think about but that is what we have to do currently if we want the same book in two different formats. It has always has been the case, and we never really questioned it because just say you bought a hardcover copy of The Grapes of Wrath, but years later wanted to re-read it while on vacation.  You might very well buy a copy of the paperback, so you don't get your nice hardback all soggy when you fall into the pool while reading it on an air mattress.  You had two copies, and because someone had to print them, ship them, and stock them, you paid for both of them.

Now, what about digital books?  You bought the hardcover, should you pay if you want to have a digital copy as well?

This exact debate has been flaring up again and again in publishing and reading circles for the past several months (years?) but really got going when the New York Times journalist Randy Cohen wrote in his Ethicist column that downloading a pirated copy of a book you already purchased new is pretty much O.K.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Then one of my admittedly favorite authors, John Scalzi chipped in his two cents on his Whatever blog and essentially agreed with Cohen. 

If that work is out there online, and the guy who just bought an authorized version — thus paying me and the people who worked on the book — downloads it for his personal use, am I going to be pissed at him? No, I don’t really have the time or inclination. Maybe it would have been marginally more ethical for the fellow to have, say, scanned in each individual page and OCR’d it himself, thus making the personal copy he’s allowed to make under law, rather than looking for it online. And maybe I’d ask him how it was he got so knowledgeable in the ways of the dirty, dirty undernet, where pure and innocent books are exposed to bad people, and suggest to him that he get his computer checked for viruses. But at the end of the day, he did pay me, and paid my publisher.

Scalzi does go on to, correctly, explain that there are limits to this; and that an Audio book is different in that the reader and sound editors are entitled to their share, and obviously you can't download the Kite Runner movie just because you bought the book, but in general both of these gentleman bring up the interesting point that a digital copy of a book you legally bought is essentially the same as making a cassette tape copy of that The Who - Live At Leeds record you wanted to preserve from the ware you knew you were going to inflict on it by playing it 3000 times.

So you know how I feel, tell me know your position while we wait for the lawyers to tell how this will end. 

Comments

[jjmcgaffey]

I buy a book twice frequently - once as an ebook as soon as it comes out, once in paperback a year or more later (this is mostly Baen SF). I dislike hardbacks - in my experience, they don't actually last much longer than a decent paperback and they a) cost a heck of a lot more and b) take up a _lot_ more room on the shelf! (This is important when you own @3500 books). Trade paperbacks are the same - not quite as bad as hardbacks, but much worse than mass market paperbacks. And Baen ebooks cost about as much as the paperback - $6 or so - which means my total cost for one book to go on my shelf and be available when I have time to sit down and dive into a book, and one book on my Palm (and/or computer) for when I'm traveling and don't have access to my paper library is about the same as a trade paperback and noticeably less than a hardback. I did buy some hardbacks recently - the Baen hardbacks that had a CD with multiple ebooks on it bound in. That made the hardback more or less worthwhile - though I got rid of it when the paperback came out.

As far as I'm concerned, the convenience and pleasure of the two different versions makes the price worth it to me. Now, admittedly, my use of ebooks (I insist that they be multi-format and non-DRM) greatly limits my pool of available books - basically, Baen and Project Gutenberg. However, that limits my pool to old books and good SF - a major part of my reading anyway! There are recent books that have come out that I'm disappointed because there's no ebook (or no non-DRM ebook) connected to them...and I'll wait until the paperback comes out and do without the ebook. The publishers get less money from me because they won't let go of the reins on ebooks - Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty is one very recent book, Lois McMasters Bujold's Sharing Knife books are others that I won't buy as ebooks because of the limits the publishers put on them. Their choice. And if (I don't go looking for it) I should find an ebook of a book I recently bought or am waiting for the paperback to buy - yes, I'll download it.

[Mandy]

Baen ebooks cost about as much as the paperback - $6 or so - which means my total cost for one book to go on my shelf and be available when I have time to sit down and dive into a book, and one book on my Palm (and/or computer) for when I'm traveling and don't have access to my paper library is about the same as a trade paperback and noticeably less than a hardback. http://www.mediafilelinks.com