Coming to campus: E-books with expiration dates

Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 09 August 2005
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When students at Princeton University, the University of Utah and eight other colleges start combing their school bookstore shelves for fall semester textbooks, they'll find a new alternative to the hard-covered tomes they're used to buying.

Alongside the new and used versions of Dante's "Inferno" and "Essentials of Psychology" will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy.

That's not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook program imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can't be read.

Ok, let's get this together: students can buy ebooks 33% cheaper than the real version. Sounds interesting. Now the problems: it's bound to a single computer, so if you don't download it onto your laptop, you're screwed. The ebook also turns into binary garbage after 5 months, leaving it completely useless. If you buy the hard copy, and you decide to keep it, you can. If not, sell it again and get some money back. With the DRM'ed version, your money is gone for good (and you're left with nothing in the end). It's not like the publisher has lots of additional costs; making 1 ebook or 1000 ebooks costs pretty much the same.