I found out that the company's strategy was to compete with neighborhood video rental stores, and that included the 10,000 title quota. So I bailed out of the project.
That is problem number 1 of e-books: I would guess that well over half of my personal library is so obscure that it will never make it to e-book format, regardless of copyright restrictions.*
Problem number 2 is that computer technology goes obsolete really, really fast. I can read books printed 100 years ago (or 500, if I could afford them), but can't read my 3.5" floppy disk drives from less than a decade ago.
Plus no risk of DRM hassles once I've gotten it into my little library.
Downside of books: When I croak, who's going to inherit all my obscure books?
* Where can one most easily find a comprehensive index of e-books, regardless of format or vendor, to test this hypothesis?
That is problem number 1 of e-books: I would guess that well over half of my personal library is so obscure that it will never make it to e-book format, regardless of copyright restrictions
That's unlikely for anything written in the PC era. There is not a significant cost involved in converting a book to e-book format, as books are composed in electronic form to begin with.
you are the media you consume.
I wonder why the various National Libraries aren't asking for those electronic forms to find their way to their hard disks... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
The Leading Edge, by Goro Tamai? Published in 1999.
