Pros And Cons Of Ebooks In Comparison With Hardcover Books - Essay Example

Pros And Cons Of Ebooks In Comparison With Hardcover BooksOne of the biggest impediments to the wholesale transition from the traditional paperback printed books to the era of the E-Books is the reluctance by publishers not to allow libraries to lend e Books as many times as the demand allows. The e Book represents a significant challenge to the traditional culture of reading where the book acted as a transmitter, shaper, and carrier of humanity’s cultural heritage as the written word. Many web adverts exhort people to purchase e Books, but the long term preservation and rights retention of the content in the books is not the norm, since most vendors and resellers do not have the rights from the publisher.

Rather than true ownership, a majority of e Book purchases are more or less leases that have very few residual rights. The only way a buyer can ensure that they get continuous access and be able to store the content in the e Book is to download the entire material to a local storage device where rights to the content is not presided over by digital rights management (DRM) systems (Walters 85-95). The content of the e Boom is transferred from a hosted service on the World Wide Web, for instance from a cloud hosting service.

The ‘buyer’ lacks control over the content, as Google Books attest; Google will stop serving the e Book content to the ‘buyer’ in the event that it (Google) loses the right to give the buyer any Digital content. While buying an e Book from an online repository, one is likely to encounter terms and conditions that read something akin to ‘you have limited, non-exclusive, personal, and revocable non-transferrable and not-assignable rights or license to use, view, and/ or play a single material copy or download a single copy on a single computer for non-commercial personal home use.

Both institutions and individuals get statements of revocable rights to use material that they have ostensibly purchased and paid money for. The content publisher retains the right to change the terms of the sale at any time! It is akin to buying an operating system in which the vendor retains the right to change the sale terms at any time and the user has non exclusive rights to use software they have paid for. Some publishers further add that they can withdraw their titles from resellers and vendors, including librarians if specific terms are flouted or not met.

Mind you, these titles have already been sold to the respective vendors or librarians (Walters 85-95). Publishers also retain rights to change the contents of the e Book without any prior notice, a concept that destroys the normal concept of selling a physical book. Once an individual purchases a book, it becomes their property, not something they paid for but looks like they have borrowed it without making any payments. Publishers and librarians are at a crossroads over the right of a paying public to download e Books or parts of their content.

The public want continued and convenient access to popular titles in an electronic format, to reflect the changing times and the changing technology. It is rare for people to buy software in CD or DVD format nowadays; people download and pay a license fee for the software they are using. This creates convenience for both the software makers and the buying public; and even reduces costs. Users even have a thirty day period in which to evaluate the software before deciding to make a purchase. The main problem publishers have is monetary; if users downloaded the titles from the library at minimal costs or for free, they will lose revenue.

This is the main point of departure between publishers and librarians. Works citedWalters, W H. "E-books in Academic Libraries: Challenges for Sharing and Use."Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. 46.2 (2014): 85-95. Print.