One of the pesky difference between e-books and printed books involves the idea of lending books to friends or family. With a paper book, this is perfectly legal; one simply hands the chunk of dead tree over and the other party begins to read it. But with e-books, the issue becomes thornier. If you e-mail or copy an e-book for a friend or family member, you’ve technically committed piracy—even if it would have been perfectly legal for you to hand them the tree.
But whether legal or not, most people don’t seem to see anything wrong with this private copying, not considering it to be substantively different than tree-handing. The Bookseller has a post on a recent report commissioned by the UK government to that effect.
The Hargreaves Report—commissioned by the UK government and published in May—highlighted "a growing mismatch between what is allowed under copyright exceptions, and the reasonable expectations and behaviour of most people . . . It is difficult for anyone to understand why it is legal to lend a friend a book, but not a digital music file. The picture is confused by the way some online content is now sold with permissions to format shift (iTunes tracks) or to ‘lend’ files (Amazon e-books) at no extra cost. This puts the law into confusion and disrepute. It is not a tenable state of affairs."
But the really intriguing part is in the next paragraph:
The Report, debated in Parliament in recent weeks, concludes that rights holders are well aware of UK consumers’ behaviour, and that their prices take this into account. It recommends that the government "introduce an exception to allow individuals to make copies for their own, and immediate family’s, use on different media".
Are UK rights-holders aware of this copying practice and effectively legitimizing it by acknowledging it in their pricing? For that matter, are American right-holders so aware and so pricing? The idea of a copyright exception for that sort of copying is rather interesting. (And this doesn’t just cover “lending” private copying, either. It has never been legalized in the UK for CDs to be ripped to MP3s the way it has in the US. So whenever someone loads up an iPod, they could be breaking the law.)
Other European nations have levies on equipment and recording media that cover this sort of copying, but the UK government isn’t inclined to open that can of worms. I wonder what shape the exception will take, or if it will take shape at all? As the article points out, the previous UK administration promised to implement a “format shifting” exception that never actually materialized.
The major difference in what the UK proposes and the lending arrangements of some books with the Kindle, etc., is that the copyright owner has agreed that the book be lended with the Kindle, but the UK is saying screw the copyright owner’s right to choose whether their book is shared, it’s all about the reader’s rights. Meanwhile, the readers want cheaper and cheaper books as well as the right to share them as they will. Something has to give, and I’m afraid it’s the writers who will lose. Songs have a much larger market than books so there is some chance of profit to be made making
I think you’ll find that once the content is easier to share, more people will buy it.