>>To me, one of the big advantages of paper books is the ability to hand them to someone else...
Amazon has caught onto this, offering a very cheap fee for the Kindle version of paper books you previously bought from them. Smart: the music industry's expectation of a full repeat purchase for the same songs on a different medium was one of the greedy behaviors that led to otherwise law-abiding people downloading via Torrents. Outside the Kindle world, eBook piracy also is rife but if it's only $.99 for a shareable Kindle version of a book you already own, who can be bothered being a pirate?
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
