nostrich:

Ebooks were supposed to be indestructible. Where you had disk-space, you had literature – in perpetuity. Which is bad news for publishers now deprived of that extra round of sales revenue engendered by books being dropped in baths.

HarperCollins has got wise to this: it has announced that US libraries will be allowed to lend ebooks only up to 26 times. Its sales president, Josh Marwell, believes that’s only fair: 26, he claims, is the average number of loans a print book would survive before having to be replaced. HarperCollins UK won’t rule out applying this ebook strategy to British libraries - and should it do so, it can expect a frustrated reaction. “Clearly, printed books last a lot longer than 26 loans,” says Philip Bradley, vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

This is the dumbest shit I have ever read. (I work for Collins — the British half of HarperCollins — incidentally, and this is far from the dumbest shit they are guilty of.)

Holy moly. This makes as much sense as

- limiting a car to the top speed of a horse-cart

- making sure the car literally falls to pieces when it reaches the end of a horse’s useful lifespan

- requiring that new medical techniques don’t work any faster, or last any longer, than old ones

- requiring that phone calls be transcribed and delivered by Western Union messengers

It also shows that some people at HarperCollins are abject toads. And that they are doomed.

Making your products arbitrarily and artificially less useful, less convenient and less attractive? Good luck with that.

(Source: nostrich)