hree
centuries ago, John Locke agreed that we shouldn't base our freedom to
read books on the proclaimed good offices of the business itself. "Books
seem to me to be pestilent things," he wrote in 1704, "and infect all
that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers,
binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have
universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind, that they have a way
of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of
society, and that general fairness that cements mankind."
Publishers need to recognize that readers are shifting to ereading, and for this group if it's not in e-book format it doesn't exist.
