NEWS: Everything Lame is New Again: E-Books Edition

Yeah, that pisses me off. I had a Speech textbook that I wanted to sell. The bookstore said that it was out of date. A friend was taking the exact same class the next semester, but I didn't find out until he already bought his books, so I had a look at his textbook. Everything was the same except the cover.

Now I'm normally a free market kind of guy. I believe that the free market can help solve most of the problems we face today, from diseases (there's a marketplace where academics and researchers place bets on where bird flu will hit, kind of like the "Terrorism futures" market that caused an uproar a few years ago. That shit works, if you allow it to) to global warming (raise taxes on hydrocarbons and the market will do the rest). However, the world of universities and colleges is not a free market, and cannot be. Each student in a given class must be using the same textbook. So the only solution to the problem of outrageous textbook prices is to control the prices that can be charged for them.

Now, we already see a bit of a free market with college books, with places like Half.com allowing students to sell their old textbooks, but the problem is that there are a a lot of students who can't buy their books off the Internet, because of things like financial aid.

Oh, and my college bookstore buys new books back for 25% of what they charge, and then sells them for 50% less than the new books. I can't remember what they do with used books...

again, you've got the hardware too closely coupled with the data. i'm not talking about whether an ebook reader is more durable, i'm talking about the text itself. you have a copy that will never degrade and can be replicated and space-shifted by the user. there is simply no comparison that will show a physical book to be a better archive format because a million perfectly identical, perfectly intact digital copies can exist on a million storage devices for almost no more effort than the first copy. the details of storage and implementation that you bring up aren't relevant because the basic principle of it makes them moot: a digital copy -- however stored, whatever considerations go into it -- will retain its integrity better than a physical copy.

water damages paper, but doesn't damage optical, magnetic, or compact-flash media. and again, if you have a copy on a device that gets damaged, there exists a perfect, identical copy on one of your other devices (or your server, or the publisher's site, or your friend's device, etc).

No, they're highly relevant. The majority of ebook retailers offer titles in proprietary and DRM formats, and as DRM standards change, access to older DRM schema is going to become a bigger problem. But more to the point, even if the DRM schema are platform independent--and who knows if they are, this is why archivists save old tape machines, disk drives, etc. along with the media they're using-- keeping and maintaining a functional repository of these schema is no simple matter, assuming they are ever released to the public domain.

water damages paper, but doesn't damage optical, magnetic, or compact-flash media. and again, if you have a copy on a device that gets damaged, there exists a perfect, identical copy on one of your other devices (or your server, or the publisher's site, or your friend's device, etc).
This is assuming a couple of things: that the ebooks themselves are device independent, which, like I already said, is no guarantee, and that there will be a general value on preserving copies of digital objects in the future. The very need for something like the Wayback Machine makes me think that digital preservation is not exactly a growth industry.

They're great resources for reference books- I just finished drafting a proposal for doing that with nursing students on clinical rotations- but I don't think the ebook market has gotten much more savvy about how they treat their data, even as they boast about how quickly the market is growing.