It is, however, a more convenient product, as you could say about a paperback vs a hardback, and again, no one thinks you can help yourself to the paperback for free once you’ve bought the hardback. No one thinks you can get the paperback for free once you’ve bought the ebook. No one thinks that once you’ve paid to see a movie at the cinema you should get the DVD version for free…well, maybe they do .

Legally…digitising your home photos should not even be raised in this context (they’re yours to do as you wish barring privacy issues perhaps), and whether ripping a CD or DVD is legal or not depends on jurisdiction. Ripping a CD is broadly acceptable for personal use; not sure about DVDs, wouldn’t the movie industry scream as loudly about that as the publishers do about book scanning?

People can already digitise their own book collections cheaply — with a scanner with an automatic document feeder, and the willingness to disembowel their books. Perhaps publishers would find that acceptable, the literal replacement of one copy with another?

Probably not. At the moment, the copyright guarding the written word — guarding the rights of the author — specifies that “no part of this work may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior written permission from the publisher.” or similar wording. It’s the dissemination that worries them.

Either way, for me, it IS about the author. I’m not sure that piracy is a huge issue — the people who steal are the people who wouldn’t have paid for a book anyway. People in Jesse’s position…it’d be nice if they supported an author they like by not pirating. I understand where they’re coming from, however. The original post was not aimed at them.

I can also envision the day when you get a free copy of the digital version with the purchase of a paperback (or vice versa perhaps). The point will then be conceded, that all formats are not equal and separate. But until then…piracy of ebooks hurts the author.

Jesse is raising an important point that highlights a contradiction within media consumption. It is acceptable, legally and socially, to see digital art as transferable between formats. We can rip CDs or DVDs to play on portable devices or to manage better on harddrive home entertainment systems, and we can equally manipulate our digital photos and videos as we require. There is also a minor industry providing specialised turntables that allow vinyl to be transferred to mp3, whilst the home scanner for digitising our old photos has been around for many years. So why is the book to be treated differently?

The answer, I believe, lies in the economics of the available technology and of the book trade. It suits the book industry that Individuals don’t have access to technology to digitise their own books, as it requires them, as you say, to purchase the books again. When profit can be made from creating and selling home digitising technology, however, I expect the legally and social opposition will magically disappear. It is about money, but not I fear about the author’s earnings.

If you had bought a book in hardback but now find the weight and size inconvenient, would you just walk into a bookstore and help yourself to the paperback version? If you had bought the paperback, would you think it was OK to take more copies of the same paperback just because you had already legitimately purchased it once?

Authors get paid per copy, regardless of format. If you want to go the ebook route, put your paper books in storage to read later and buy some new ebooks to take with you.

In a few short months I will be heading to Afghanistan for roughly a year. I will be dragging across the world a requisite amount of issued equipment that will tally, literary, in the hundreds of pounds. My Bachelor’s degree is in English, so, unsurprisingly, I have hundreds of books in my house. I even have a bookcase dedicated solely to books that I want to read right now, at this moment (however, clearly that is not a feasible option, so I must painfully and artfully choose each successive book to read).
So when I deploy, I want to bring these books with me, books that I already own, downrange. But understandably I do not want to add unnecessary weight to the caravan of equipment and stuff that I am already bringing if it can be helped.

I am new to the ebook world and as of yet I do not even own an e-reader. However, I have begun toying with the idea of rather than dragging 20 books halfway across the world, perhaps I could simply bring one singular device that could hold those same books, thus saving space and weight. Yet here is the crux of the issue: When I have dozens of books I already own that are in queue to be read, why spend additional money on ‘other’ titles. (stay with me) Moreover, (and most importantly for this discussion) why do I have to buy the same book twice, simply because I am trying to acquire the said book in a different format? If I have legitimately purchased the book, paid dues to the author, publishing houses, etc once, why must I be required to expend my money a second time to receive something I already own?
I feel like there should be some kind of ‘authority’ in which I can go to and prove that I own these books (I don’t know what ‘proving’ would entail or how it would be accomplished — perhaps some kind of national ISBN tracking program).

I’ve looked into my local library system, because, clearly, a borrow/return system would work the best in my case. However our local library has only a little over a thousand ebook titles. Which seems like a lot, but once one removes the romances, the mysteries, the westerns — in short, all the books I have no interest in, there remains little or none from my list (I think I found one).

Perhaps, in the end, I do not fully understand all the implications and underpinnings that accompany this issue. Maybe ebook piracy (along with other forms of media piracy) centers on COPIES rather than CONTENT. My angle, in retrospect, is on content. I feel that I should only have to pay once for content. Maybe copies of media is actually the central issue.