I have downloaded pirated copies of books and then bought the paperback, just to have the electronic version with me. I always thought that ebooks would become available at a significant discount, because of the lack of cost to the publisher, but I again was disappointed as the publishers weren’t willing to lose any chunk of their profit margin. I would be ok with this if there wasn’t any DRM on the titles that are available in electronic format. I refuse to buy any ebook with DRM because If I have a group of 6 friends and we all buy different books, read them and then share them with each other this isn’t considered illegal, but for reasons beyond me it’s not ok to do this with an ebook. Even If I don’t share it, I still may have to repurchase it if I get a different device or the company goes out of business.

I don’t know if they’re still around, but there was a library somewhere in the U.S. that was offering users to borrow copies of ebooks that they had purchased for the library. If they had 3 licenses for a certain book, then 3 borrowers could download the book for a period of 2 weeks and then it would no longer open on your device. At that same time it would then become available for someone else to borrow. If you hadn’t finished it in 2 weeks you could borrow (download it again) for another 2 week period.

I would love it if this would become more mainstream and more titles were available to borrow.

There are pirates who, when confronted with convenient and reasonably priced services, will never stop pirating – they’ll never be your customers to begin with, and the focus on locking down everything so that there is no piracy only serves to dissuade consumers from moving over to the new model, unless the DRM is so unobtrusive that it doesn’t really hamper the usage of the media. This is something that, unfortunately, is somewhat lacking in ebooks so far, since there has yet to be an iTunes-like experience with eBooks which has been relatively universal and easily accessible (Kindle marketplace locks things down too much; Sony even more so until recently, and even with their abandoning BBeB for Adobe Digital Editions they’re still somewhat locked down, and MobiPocket WAS the easiest – you could have multiple devices on a variety of platforms with the same books – but has since gone over to the Kindle side at the beck and call of their corporate masters).

Baen Webscriptions is probably the best ebook selling model I’ve seen thus far – they don’t DRM their product, they offer a free selection of FULL books (which Google Books doesn’t, for the most part – I still can’t find a full version of the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes which I can download and read) to whet the appetite of a would-be pirate, and then they allow you to read those books in a variety of formats (ePub, MobiPocket, RocketBooks, Sony BBEB) which are perfectly justified and laid out, because they did all the work for you. And you can redownload the books at will, without limit, and without fear that they’ll yank the book from your device after purchase because they WANT to. Even Apple, with its kill-switch, has so far avoided pulling this stunt; they disapproved Google Voice, but they’ve yet to be known in the news for being the company that’ll reach into the device for content you bought from them in order to remotely delete it without warning.