Apple Now Lets iOS Users Send Gifts from iBookstore
I'll tell you why they didn't before now..
Books, more than anything else, are information, which most people understand should be free. When you purchase a hard copy of a book, you are paying for the publishing of that hard copy. Libraries have provided the information for free for years, and it was publicly understood that it should be so, and we fought hard for our rights to it.
Now for some reason, white people with way too much money (they have digital 'readers' or 'pads'?) are destroying the future by actually paying for electronic copies of books, many of which are public-domain and don't even have an author benefitting from the purchases.
Please, stop these white people. The fate of future generations depend upon it. Tell them they can download the books for fre...
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Also, the text of the book itself may not be copyrighted, but there are often many study materials such as marginal notes, commentary, essays, introduction etc, and these study materials are copyrighted.
If all you want is the text of the book itself with nothing else, then the Project Guttenberg or Google Books is free and easy to obtain. Most readers however want the study materials, especially if the text in question is an old one. Very few people feel comfortable reading something like Shakespeare or Milton or even Dickens without at least some explanation or commentary.
In addition, a text may be copyrighted, how...
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At the beginning of my post I indicated that I believe they have been slow to introduce book sales on the network because of the reasons stated. Nowhere did I advocate that a 'book' ought always to be 'free'.
In fact, one can infer from what I said that if people wish to 'collect' a book for themselves then they should pay for their copy.
However, it makes very little sense to anyone to pay for an electronic copy of a book (there is such a plethora of "study materials" already available for free), so they had to wait for an appropriate time to market the service.
This forum is closed.