Musings of Ryder Step

So, I saw this article on Slashdot LINK (you can go and read it now, Slashdot is nice cause the articles are short.) So I was thinking about how a lot of the entertainment mediums have been subjected to massive amounts of piracy. The most affected industries are music, movies, and television. Obviously anything that can be converted into ones and zeros could potentially be pirated. They talk about how now that we have an effective medium for enjoying books, the piracy rate may go up. The medium they are talking about are E-Book readers. We have had computer monitors since the beginning of the computing age, but some people find that reading a computer monitor causes eye strain.

One thing I found interesting is one of my friends said he would much rather read long articles on a computer monitor rather than print them out (and he was in college and had free access to printing). I feel the same way, but only because I ALWAYS lose anything that I don't have a digital copy of. Physical copies of important documents always get lost, so I try to get digital copies of them or I create them by scanning. But I do think this generation is going to be so accustomed to reading black and white text on a computer monitor that reading actual paper is going to be strange.

This can also be related back to music piracy. A recent 8 year study showed that this generation of kids prefers the sound of mp3 to uncompressed music (CD/FLAC/lossless etc) (article). The findings of this study made the Hi-Fi nerd in me cringe, but it shows how people prefer what they are use to (like the pops in records). It's only a matter of time before kids think it's weird that you can buy a book from a store rather than download it and read it on their computer.

So do I think e-book piracy is going to escalate now that we have e-book readers? My answer is yes. But I don't think that it is going to make me want to pirate material more than before. I'm not a big fan of e-book readers and if I read a book I still like to have the physical media. The same way that if I really really like an album I will buy it (hopefully on vinyl if it's available)