Nope, I still am not the biggest fan of E-Book Museums, which don’t let you download files, just view them through a browser.
Still, it’ll be interesting to see if the $350 Nokia 770 and the forthcoming $500 Pepper Pad benefit from their mix of WiFi and Web-browsing capabilities.
I think those “museums” are ok for doing research. They are not good for reading though, and devices like the pepper pad and the 770 aren#t going to change that.
You could read a whole book that way, but you’d have to use an active WiFi link all the time (battery, reception varies) adn you would’t have all those nice bookmarking, annotation and whatnot features you’re used to from good old paper books.
Doing the whole “not downloadable” act is also not going to solve piracy problems.
there are people out there right now scanning whole paper books, OCRing them and then putting them up for free on p2p networks.
Imagine how easy it would be to do this for google books! Take a screenshot of the page-area, send the pic to your OCR software and you’re done. Making a small applet that pages through the book should also be possible…
I don’t know whether this would really work…I haven’t tried it and am not going to do so…this is just an example for how restrictions can be “bypassed”. Scanning a physical book is hard work and needs expensive machinery to work well, so doing this or something like it should pose no great problem.