I have purchased a number of e-books and technical standards and I think it's a great way to get information you need quickly. I just purchased the American Gas Association Report No. 8 from techstreet.com and was given two options: 1) Adobe PDF (instant) or 2) hard copy (3-5 days). The price differential was significant with the PDF being $172 and the hard copy being $300. This seemed like a no-brainer to me as I can always print it out. Right?
So I purchased it and downloaded it and discovered I now needed to load a plug in for Acrobat, which effectively locks my PDF to a single machine. That's an inconvenience, because now I can't put it on my laptop so if I travel, I now need to lug around a printout. At least so I thought.
It's 200 pages so I figured I would be kind to my laser printer and print only 50 pages at a time and let it cool down a bit between printings. No problem. I got the first 100 pages and was getting set to printout the next 50 when it told me I have now used up my allotted number of printouts, which I guess is only two. Of course it is now 15 minutes after techstreet has closed for the day so I'm just plain out of luck until tomorrow.
I understand intellectual property protection, but this method only exasperates and penalizes the customer who has already paid for your product. It has not penalized or inconvenienced the guy that actually is behaving criminally.
To be continued...