@Daryl: Chris Anderson makes a similar argument in Free, which clearly you’ve confirmed. The trouble right now as I see it comes down to book publishers trying to inflate e-book prices. The magic of iTunes is the 99¢ price-point, which is cheap enough, I think, to encourage plenty of legitimate music purchasing. Until book publishing better understands the psychology of pricing (especially of digital pricing), I’m pretty sure e-book adoption will continue to be slow and uneven.

“Hey, have you heard Band of Horses yet? They rock, let me rip you a copy.”

I would say that amongst my friends that share music we so with the hope that they will dig the music and pop out to your favorite on-line music store and purchase another album from that band.

Can the same be said for e-books? I would like to think so.

“You mean you haven’t Alice Seabold’s ‘Almost Moon’. It just about is the happiest book I’ve ever read.”

So I say, let the sharing and the the purchasing of other material begin!!!

I agree: it’s a form of piracy that the big players know instinctively well. As you say in your book “The Late Age of Print” in regards to foreign copyright rules at the turn of century in America, the big companies initially ignored paying royalties to foreign authors/titles and only changed their minds about it later when smaller book publishers, doing what they were doing, seemed to be profiting from the same publishing profligacy.

I think the presses will follow the RapidShare example.

By the way, just finished your book. Outstanding! It’s torn down walls for me and given me a fresh window on the topic of e-books and the changing conditions of literacy.