Trapdoor Books

Digital Books, and Your Rights

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently examining issues of reader-rights for digital book publishing. On their website at "https://www.eff.org/wp/digital-books-and-your-rights" they begin with this overview: "After several years of false starts, the universe of digital books seems at last poised to expand dramatically. Readers should view this expansion with both excitement and wariness. Excitement because digital books could revolutionize reading, making more books more findable and more accessible to more people in more ways than ever before. Wariness because the various entities that will help make this digital book revolution possible may not always respect the rights and expectations that readers, authors, booksellers and librarians have built up, and defended, over generations of experience with physical books. "As new digital book tools and services roll out, we need to be able to evaluate not only the cool features they offer, but also whether they extend (or hamper) our rights and expectations. "The over-arching question: are digital books as good or better than physical books at protecting you and your rights as a reader?" They follow with a "checklist for readers" to consider about the implications of digital books versus paper books. Included in the list is one of my concerns with soft-media of any kind: Do I own the copy of the item, or not? What if I finish using the item and want to sell it to someone else? My own opinion is based on the metaphor of paper books (sometimes called "treeware"). Yes, I can finish reading a paper book and pass it to someone else. I want to be able to do likewise with digital (or "soft") books. If I'm prevented from doing so, then it's not really a book, to me. What does the Trapdoor community think about these issues of privacy, freedom, and ownership?