Could This be Good News for Booklovers?
- Fran
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Could This be Good News for Booklovers?

Is this happy days for us book purchasers or could the downside be that it hastens the demise of the hard copy book?
A world is born again that never dies.
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- Maud Fitch
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They will move on to the academic arena (where you already to have to pay-to-view most journals online) and set a fee according to the purse of the educational establishment. You can see what's developing here. The rich get richer and the underdog struggles to keep up. Rifts in society will occur where older people will cling desperately to paper books, seeking comfort from the worn pages, while the younger people churn through e-book after e-book, disconnected, heads in the Cloud. To paraphrase Irving R. Kaufman "There remain some truths too ephemeral to be captured in the cold pages of an e-book".
Worst case scenario, of course.
- Fran
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Seriously though I know Amazon are not a charity (or any of the other publishing houses either) & it goes without saying profit is the driving motivation but there has to be some good news if it knocks the publishing cartel on the head & stops them engaging in price fixing.

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- DATo
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Makes sense to me. They did the same thing with cable TV here in The States. The whole enticing argument for "cable" was that you paid a reasonable fee for this service and in return you were not subjected to commercials. Totally logical - the subscribing viewers were taking the place of the sponsors and their subscription fees were paying for the programming. In this scenario there would be totally commercial-free viewing of all programming and when a program you are watching was over there would be only a short lull to present coming attractions before programming recommenced. Today there are more commercials on cable TV than on regular TV and the "reasonable" entry rates have skyrocketed.Maud Fitch wrote:It's manipulation all the way, Fran. They get you hooked on cheap e-books then squeeze out the bookshops, close down the free public libraries and before you know it, they control the whole supply. When demand becomes too great, they start restricting the flow of e-books and the bestsellers will start to incure a higher and higher fee.
I've been following primrose's thread about her book fair experiences and every time I read one of those posts I have to wonder if book fairs will soon be considered in the same light as antique auctions. When I was a kid I used to wonder why "older people" were always so cranky .... now that I AM an "older people" I am beginning to learn the answer to that question.
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Maya Angelou
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When Blu-ray first came out my mom insisted that it would sputter out and not go anywhere. I know some people still feel this way about ebooks and I think that's one of the big pushes to make them reasonably priced. They want to establish themselves as a solid format despite the fact some people feel they aren't purchasing something tangible.
- by Me said originally to my hubby
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