The Quilt Inn Country Cookbook

Aliske Webb

Please think about this

When a person buys a paper book and loans it to a friend to read, they are recommending

a good read and sharingtheir purchase. This is a long accepted practice in the book publishing

industry - that there is more than one reader for each book purchased.

When a person uses a photocopier to make a copy of that book to pass to a friend,

whether they know it or not, they are breaking copyright laws - not that any publisher can do

anything about policing this situation. But photocopying a book is time-consuming and expensive

for the copier so most people don't do it, and, most reputable instant copy shops will not copy

more than a few pages of printed books because they are aware of the copyright restrictions and

could well be charged if the "customer" turns out to be a law enforcement officer.

With the ease of distribution of information on the internet and the ease of attaching files

to emails, a whole new problem exists for epublishers. Unlike sharing a paper book with a friend,

when a person purchases an ebook and then sends iton to a friend, they are making a copy of the

ebook. In other words, two copies of the book exist where there once was only one which was

originally purchased. This is infringement of copyright law.

If a person sends the ebook to one hundred friends... then there are 101 copies now in

existence. If those people copy and pass on the ebook... You can see how this situation very

quicklygets out of hand. And this is absolutely infringement of copyrightlaw. But again, almost

impossible to control or prosecute.

However, the inevitable result of this internetplagiarism will be that authors and epublishers

will no longer choose tomake works available electronically because they will not be able to make

afairlivingfromtheirworks.Thiswillmeanthattheonlyworksthatwillbeavailableontheinternet

will be books in the public domain(the same ones now available in libraries). People will not be

able to read their favorite popular authors on the net. Copyright law now protects copyright for

seventyyears - people will soon tire of only being able to read ebooks that are over seventy years

old!

Ebooks are normally priced lower than traditional paper publications as a reflection of the

fact that trees are not cut down to produce themand there are no high storage or distribution fees

associated with them. The electronic medium is providing all of us with an exciting and powerful

tool of communication and knowledge. Let's not destroy the dream of a literate global village.

Please, be a responsible ebook reader.

Published by Bookmice.com

Country Cooking