Computer Shopper columnist Jim O’Brien recently did a pretty good job of summing up everything that’s wrong with current e-book schemes (for an article that was generally very optimistic about the future of e-books). Responding to critics of e-books, O’Brien wrote,
E-book publishers have some work to do to prove them wrong. First, they have to stop obsessing over copyright protection and royalties — what publishers and authors want — and start focusing on what consumers want. They need to lift the unnecessary restrictions on e-book readers concerning printing, cutting, pasting, and sharing. Book buyers are older and busier than the teens and college students the music industry targets, so Napster-style piracy isn’t a problem.
Absolutely. On the other hand, I wish computer magazines would give readers what they want to. I actually read this story in the print version and it struck me as odd that computer magazines, especially, which are published both in print and on the web don’t simply print the URL to the web version of a story in the print magazine.
The reason, at least in the case of Computer Shopper, is that it wouldn’t make much difference because the URL for O’Brien’s story looks like this: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/comment/0,5859,2688447,00.html
Yuck. I don’t understand why companies spend so much money on content management systems that are apparently diametrically opposed to human-readable URLs.