eBooks and iBooks, &tc.

So the iPad seems to have launched a chain of events that led to Amazon.com pulling every book published by MacMillan? The disagreement had to do with ebook prices - Amazon wants to sell all ebooks for $9.99 and MacMillan wants to sell them for more - but all MacMillan titles, both ebooks and regular books, were pulled. Since I'm no expert on the subject, here's a good summary of the Amazon/MacMillan situation from the Washington Post. In the end, Amazon relented and agreed to let MacMillan sell their ebook titles on the website for more than $9.99. Which I think is good. I mean, the content of an ebook is the same as that in a hard copy of the same title, right? So why should they be worth less?

Here's what I think would be cool: if you could get the hard copy and the electronic copy of a book in one go. Like with CDs. You buy an album and you get all the cool artwork, and the physical disc, and the case you can put in a plastic tower in your room with all your other cases so that all your friends can see what awesome taste in music you have. But you also get to rip the music to your computer and put it on your portable music-playing device. Wouldn't it be cool if in the future you could buy a physical book that would come with a little chip tucked into the back cover or somewhere, that would allow you to upload the book to your computer and then to your portable reading device? It would be the best of both worlds: you could choose whether you wanted to read the hard copy or the ebook, or you could switch between the two. Oh, and all titles would be universally playable on all portable reading devices. Okay, so it's probably a daft idea that wouldn't work for all sorts of logical reasons, but seriously, how amazing would that be?