Thomas J. Hennen Jr. writes \”Three things have made the news lately that brought parts of the web to a halt:
the hacker attacks on Yahoo,
Brittanica\’s launch as a free online encyclopedia,
and Stephen King\’s e-book \”Riding the Dollar – oops I mean- Bullet.\”
Isn\’t it nice, in a way, that two of the three were book related?
But I have a serious concern! 🙂
What will happen to collectors? How does one get a first edition of an e-book? King may have missed an historic chance here! Why didn\’t he and the publishers issue a first edition for e-book collectors?
Thomas J. Hennen Jr. writes \”Three things have made the news lately that brought parts of the web to a halt:
the hacker attacks on Yahoo,
Brittanica\’s launch as a free online encyclopedia,
and Stephen King\’s e-book \”Riding the Dollar – oops I mean- Bullet.\”
Isn\’t it nice, in a way, that two of the three were book related?
But I have a serious concern! 🙂
What will happen to collectors? How does one get a first edition of an e-book? King may have missed an historic chance here! Why didn\’t he and the publishers issue a first edition for e-book collectors?
These collectors are out there, dontcha know? I know one with shrink-wrapped copies of MS-DOS 1.0 waiting to make a killing on e-bay. Another collects those ever-present AOL disks like others collect bubble gum cards or stamps. Surely there will soon be a market for digital first editions.
Can\’t you just picture the guilt-edged (sic) rocket book? It is complete with brushed leather binding and a digital watermark in a numbered edtion. As we all know, for ordinary books, the less handled and the more pristine the condition of the book, the more the value. So for a digitally numbered copy of an e-book it would have to be a bit like a fine wine. Once opened it would have no collector value on the open market. What a perfect post-modern product THAT would be! The hoi poloi actually READING the thing, but the elite collectors proudly brandishing their un-read first e-dition.
So what does King do for book signings, anyway? Cyberchatrooms and digital signatures?
See and see also:
http://www.softwareindustry.org/issues/1digsig.html
————
Thomas J. Hennen Jr.
http://www.haplr-index.com
[email protected]
\”
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