Ebooks - Prices and Sharing

I'm a big fan of the site book crossing, where you can either post books to other people around the world, or leave books lying in a coffee shop waiting for someone else to pick them up. When they do this, they can read your book, they can register this on the site as each book has it's own unique code on the book. The book can be read dozens of times, if you check the stats page you'll see that the top book has been read over 450 times.

When you look at the publishers arguments for the price of ebooks, they claim that $7 cheaper is a good deal for consumers. Now, a book being read 450 times is exceptional, but at my house we have books that are decades old, sure the pages have yellowed a little, but for the most part they are fine. I would have trouble finding a working floppy disk from my own teens. These are books I can pick up and read now, I don't have to worry about DRM, or finding an old digital reader.

My point is that technology keeps changing, formats keep changing (Sony recently changed all their ebooks to ePub from the BBeB format - I think my formats are right, I haven't double checked, it's from memory). Or look at the Amazon Kindle, Amazon recalled 1984 from Kindle readers, they were able to remotely delete the books. If publishers want me to buy their digital books, they are going to have to sell them at a significant discount on the print version, effectively I'm the only one who can read it - I certainly can't post it to someone else, and realistically I expect a five-year shelf-life on the digital book.

Don't get me wrong, when my Sony Reader had a battery that lasted a week I thought it was great, but I don't think the trade-off is worth it, not at this price.