There's an ability to offer a lower-quality copy of the work, making them "streaming e-paper" or some such, with low-res image PDFs available as downloads, equivalent to screencaps. Anyone who wanted to put the work into it could have a good version (unlike taping from the radio, where there's no way to improve the quality), but the amount of work involved is so high that very few people would bother--especially if access were reasonably priced.
The big problem isn't quality or downloadability; it's licensing. There's no book equivalent of the RIAA to allow companies to sell access to books-of-choice for a pre-established fee. (And I'm not sure I want one. But I want it considered.)
And yeah, it's obviously not going to work to just set up "streaming book channels" paid for by ads & membership funding. But I'd love more consideration of the idea, of ways that ebooks could be presented as so tremendously different from the way pbooks are sold and shared and archived, that publishers stop acting like ebooks are directly competing with hardcovers.
Ads are very, very problematic for ebooks. Not just because people don't want their reading interrupted by ads, but because current ebook models don't allow the ads to be worth paying for, from the advertisers' viewpoint. An ad in a downloaded book is seen by, what, up to 6 people legitimately? If the book is shared outside of legit channels, the ads will almost certainly be stripped. Advertisers aren't going to cut the cost of the book in half to reach 1-6 viewers.
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The big problem isn't quality or downloadability; it's licensing. There's no book equivalent of the RIAA to allow companies to sell access to books-of-choice for a pre-established fee. (And I'm not sure I want one. But I want it considered.)
And yeah, it's obviously not going to work to just set up "streaming book channels" paid for by ads & membership funding. But I'd love more consideration of the idea, of ways that ebooks could be presented as so tremendously different from the way pbooks are sold and shared and archived, that publishers stop acting like ebooks are directly competing with hardcovers.
Ads are very, very problematic for ebooks. Not just because people don't want their reading interrupted by ads, but because current ebook models don't allow the ads to be worth paying for, from the advertisers' viewpoint. An ad in a downloaded book is seen by, what, up to 6 people legitimately? If the book is shared outside of legit channels, the ads will almost certainly be stripped. Advertisers aren't going to cut the cost of the book in half to reach 1-6 viewers.