How about this, I am legally blind and the only way I can read the Harry Potter books is through ebooks as I am also hearing impaired and can not use audio book, if they are even available in that form, so if I want to read the Harry Potter books I cannot unless I get a pirated copy. You would think that as a former school teacher that Rowlings would want her books to be available to everybody.

Thought I’d come back and give Techdirt another chance. Woohoo. Looks like it’s the same ol’ same ol’. But before I go….

“While the headline is a tad sloppy (hey, YOU try maintaining a site as extensive as Techdirt), e-book readers DON’T have a legitimate way of enjoying the HP series.”

First off, regarding “a site as extensive as Techdirt”. LMAO.

Techdirt is far from extensive. They have a crew of a half-dozen whiney-nosed geeks trying to write a total of maybe a dozen three-paragraph blog-style “articles” every day. Most of it is regurgitate of what I see on Slashdot, David Pogue’s CIRCUITS out of the NY Times, Wired, and whatever seems to be coming out of Google News. If any of the techdirt writers put more than 15 minutes’ effort into writing any one of their “articles”, given their weak writing style, then they are making a horrible waste of their time. Most of it doesn’t even appear edited, it just looks like a stream-of-consciousness brain dump, and for all I can tell, Techdirt writers appear to do all their writing from laptops on the loo as a way to distract themselves from their constipation, a wild-a$$ guess that only makes sense only because it would explain their incessantly-grumpy demeanor.

Second, “e-book readers DON’T have a legitimate way of enjoying the HP series.”

No. E-book readers don’t have a CONVENIENT way to enjoy the HP series. Several posters above have already pointed out you can scan the book in yourself. That’s legitimate. But legitimacy is not your concern. CONVENIENCE is. Just as the original Techcrap writer is only FORCED to pirate if they believe their CONVENIENCE to be some god-given right instead of a privilege.

As to the above idiot who started listing out prices of alternate ways to get books, such as libraries being FREE and used bookstores being 25 cents or so, you sir are a moron. Part of the reason why people buy books is because there is a time-limited factor. True fans of the series want to read the series for themselves as soon as they can, for various reasons. One of those reasons is that they want to read the book and to discover how it turns out so that the plot of the book is not spoiled by others conversing about the book. One of those reasons is that they want to read the book so that they CAN converse with others about the book. If you want to do that during the time when most of the other people are talking about the book, then you have a limited time window after the book’s release in order to get a copy of the book and to read it.

The library book is not free. The library pays the same price as anyone else for the book. Yes, the library then shares the book, but so can anyone else who shares the book, and that is perfectly legal. The difference is that when you buy a copy, you only have one copy, and unless you make your own copy of the book, digital or otherwise, then you only have one copy to share. It is the copying of the book which copyrights protect. The library book, or the legitimately loaned personally-purchased book, when shared out, of course do not need to cost anything to those to whom the book is shared. But in practice, even this analogy fails. Libraries make a good deal of money in late fees when shared books are not returned according to a schedule. So in that sense, anyone who is paying a late fee of even a few cents on the book is not getting a “FREE” copy of the book. Furthermore, most libraries purchase the books for the community based at least in part on government funding from taxes collected by the community. Meaning, even if I don’t pay to check out a copy of Harry Potter from my library, I’ve already paid for some small fractional portion of the book in my taxes. Note this is also true — I’m paying for the book even if I *DON’T* check it out. Also, because libraries only buy a limited quantity of books, not every person who wants the book in that limited post-release window is going to be able to get a copy of the book from the library in a timely enough fashion in order to meet their wants.

The used bookstore scenario is even more ridiculous because here you ARE paying for the book, but generally you can’t walk into a used bookstore on the day of a book’s release, or even the WEEK of a book’s release and expect to be able to pick up a copy of the latest Harry Potter book. True, in some cases, used bookstores supplement their used selections with new selections, but in those cases, you’re buying the book retail the same as you would at any other bookstore, so I’m not considering those purchases as “used” because they’re in fact new books as part of a new-bookseller side-business inside the used-bookseller sales model. At best, if a rabid fan buys the book at midnight on release night, reads it during the next 24 hours, and then somehow despite being a rabid fan, decides to SELL their prized book to a used bookstore, you could argue that it is POSSIBLE for a person to get a copy used a day or so after its release. But still not ON the day of the release. If you want that, then the used-bookstore model is not reliable. Furthermore, the previous timeline is as compressed as possible, and is much more compressed than is likely. Often the people who buy the books retail on the first few days are the ones who will keep the books to re-read again and again. The ones who are less committed to the series will wait a while and pick up the new book at some point that is convenient to them, and then will take longer to read the series than the rabid fans, and only then will they decide to unload the book at some used bookstore. And people don’t unload just one book at a time at a used bookstore typically — they decide they have too many paperbacks and then they take a box over. So it might be MONTHS before some casual reader who purchased a Harry Potter book in the second or third week of release actually decides to take it to the bookstore. Moreover, the books available at release date are not paperbacks, but hardbacks. So the devout readers of the series pay a premium to keep a higher-grade book that they will keep, simply because they know they are making a long-term purchase and not just buying a casual book that they will discard after reading. So in most cases, the idea of seeing a Harry Potter book in a used bookstore takes even LONGER because you not only have to wait until after the release date, but after the PAPERBACK release date, which is often much later.

As to the arguments that ebooks are so much more expensive blah blah blah. I can’t say for certain because not enough details were given, but I’d say it is likely that you are comparing the PAPERBACK price to the E-BOOK price. If you look at the original hardback price along with the e-book price, you’d see the price difference makes much more sense. E-books should be cheaper — well they ARE often cheaper than the hardbacks.

Also, all of you idiots who jump to the Luddite accusation of books vs. e-books, it’s funny how much of Techdirt is also complaining about the lack of a paper trail on voting machines. And how much of Techdirt is also complaining about how the media companies are FORCING you to pay as you switch from one media to another, as in the case of paying for a record on LP, then cassette, then CD, then iTunes.

BOOKS ARE THE ORIGINAL PAPER TRAIL OF OUR SOCIETY. When I buy a book, I know that the copy I purchase will be good for many, many years if I keep it in good shape. I personally own a few books more than a hundred years old that are in very readable shape, and dozens of books that are more than 50 years old which are in excellent condition. I have every reason to believe that if I buy a book today, if I have the desire to keep it long enough, my great-grandchildren could still read the same book a hundred years from now.

BOOKS ARE THE ORIGINAL PLAIN-VANILLA FORMAT AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN FREE FROM DRM SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT DIGITAL. All you wuss boys lured by the “sexiness” of e-book technology are laughable as you say you’re forced to pay to upgrade formats. No one can guarantee that the e-book, the PDF, or even the plain-vanilla ASCII text document you have now will be able to be read even ten years from now, let alone a hundred. Even if the format is still valid, or convertible to another format, you still have to store the electronic image somewhere on some medium, and to preserve it as mediums change you will have to transfer it from one medium to another. From the hard drive on your computer, to an SD card on your palm pilot, to an archive of your books on a network drive, to an internet web site hosting the archive of your books, and when that site or archive expires or no longer meets your needs, to transfer things to another site. And then yes you still need to be able to read whatever data you transferred — leading you back to the format question again. And yes, plain vanilla ASCII text will likely be valid as a format for many many years to come… And for things like Harry Potter which have no pictures, charts or diagrams, reformatting plain vanilla ASCII text into something prettier is trivial for a book-reader… But it is a much more complicated process if the book is technical in nature and has diagrams, pictures and the like which add to the content. Sure you can have captions and footnotes and numbered diagrams, but there is a benefit to having a layout which puts the diagrams on the same page as the relevant text…. something that is not always easily done in pagination functions of more complicated programs … and certainly which is not within the limits of a standard ASCII text file. (And yes, you can save it as XML and hope that will be around a bazillion years hence, but then you’re just betting the farm on that format.)

And here’s the REALLY REALLY REALLY funny thing. BOOKS CAN BE SHARED BY ANYONE.

Sure you can copy the e-book to a bazillion friends, and it’s perfectly free to anyone who has an e-book reader of that format. But guess what? I can buy Harry Potter as a book, and if I want to loan it to a friend, I can just give it to them. I don’t have to worry about if they have a reader that can read that format. Sure I could give my reader to my friend too, but in my case my reader is a palm smartphone, and how likely am I to loan my entire phone and organizer to a friend for a week or two while they read the book? Not at all. And then there’s the actual – *GASP* – SOCIAL – yes SOCIAL function of books that exists because of their sharability. I pick up a copy of a book in an airport as something to occupy my time on a long plane flight. The book has a cover that gives some depiction of its content, at least title and author generally. A person sitting nearby me on the plane might see the cover and talk to me about it. They could not have done that if I was just hitting the scroll button on my smartphone; they would have had no idea if I was reading a book or if I was playing a game or writing an email for work. So a book provides a certain social approachability, which might be appalling to the privacy-freak antisocial geek crowd, but which has considerable appeal for anyone social. And the physical nature of the book just makes it more socially flexible. If the person on the plane is a cute chick that’s just asking about the book as a way to start up a conversation, heck not only can I give her the book but I can write whatever I want in the book, too. Sure maybe you could edit the e-book somehow and pass it on as a file IF she had the right e-book reader, but that’s soooo impersonal and geeky, whereas YOUR book with YOUR handwriting in her hands is a much more tangible reminder of your meeting. And all of those social possibilities are not even considering the legions of people who buy books and then regularly violate their sanctity by writing in the books, in the margins and in between the lines, either ideas that they have from reading the books, or other thoughts that come to mind. This is not so true with fiction, but is very true with people who regularly buy non-fiction books, especially books with a training or instructional nature to their content.

The idea that Techdirt and its lemming-minded wave of commentators does not immediately GET or understand any of this underscores Techdirt as Techcrap.