Strayer wrote:
Removing DRM and putting a book on another device is illegal. It is stealing.
Yes, it's illegal. No, it's not stealing. You can't steal something you legally purchased and paid for.
Now if you go and post it for others to download without paying the rights owner, then you are stealing and helping others to steal. (And IMO, you should be locked in a dungeon with no light and no books for the rest of your life.)
AlanNJ wrote:I agree completely. That said, I have no loyalty to either B&N or Amazon but I do like the Nook Simple Touch more than the Kindle Touch (from what I've seen in the store). If Amazon starts lowering prices I will need to purchase my books from Amazon, remove DRM, and put them on my N2E. I am not going to pay more just because it's B&N and not Amazon. I don't have that kind of loyalty to ANY corporation.
So, say you think about this in terms of only yourself, not company loyalty. If everyone jumps ship to amazon for book-buying, there probably won't be a nook 3 (as there probably won't be a B&N). Would you be cool with that?
Because if the answer is no, you should probably still buy at least some of your books at B&N. 
bklvr896 wrote:
Po1gara wrote:Thank you gb18 for the article links...it will be interesting to see how this all washes out.
While I agree that the agency model has probably been of benefit to retailers trying to compete with Amazon, I still can't wholly agree with it on principal. Usurping a retailer's right to compete in the market place on price, discounts and coupons just doesn't seem right. We were originally promised a seemingly more rational pricing scheme for ebooks...new releases under $20 (and definitely less than the hard cover price) and a drop in price when paperbacks are released (again to a price point under the paper copy price). Instead we've seen some ebook prices the same or higher than the hard cover price and no reduction in prices when paperbacks were released making the ebook more expensive than the paperback. We've also not seen the 'sort of'' promise that ebooks would be reduced over time as their paper cousins are (at least not consistantly, I won't claim its never happened). All in all, it just seems like the publishers have made it more confusing and frustrating for the consumers...as AlanNJ has said, we all work hard for our money and especially now with the economy and unemployment figures where they are, it makes it even harder to justify spending the money on what amounts to a few KB of DRM'd digital code. At least with hard cover or paperbacks you could recoup some money in used book sales.
Just my 2 cents worth.
I've seen this happen, but I've also seen a lot of instances where it looks like the paperback is cheaper than the eBook, when looking at the main books screen. But if you actually look at the paperback you see it has not been released yet. A while back, someone posted a list of about 8 books where they said the eBook was higher than the paperback, while in fact, the paperback was a pre-order and had not been released. Once the paperback was released the eBook price came down within a few days.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, where eBooks are higher than paperbacks, but the way the B&N page for the book is set up, it can appear that eBooks are higher than paperbacks, if you don't look further.
Well, it definitely does happen. The most commonly cited example is Atlas Shrugged, which used to be $7 for the paperback and $28 for the ebook. As you can see they're now only $3 apart, but that's still an extra $3 for the ebook over the paperback.
I've also seen a number of instances where a book doesn't have a HC release, so the new release is paperback, and because B&N can discount the paperback, the ebook is more expensive. In fact, for almost all of the authors that I read that have paperback new releases, I can't think of one where the ebook wasn't more expensive.
FWIW, most of the cases where the ebook is more expensive are from Penguin.
