Hi Mary, I see your point, and I do the same thingwith the new books list and with books that have quality problems. Nonetheless, people buy books and then don't get around to reading them. Some people also buy books that they only read once, but that doesn't give them a discount on the price of the book. But, whatever your intended use or lack thereof, you still had to shell out the money. So, it does seem to me that a download is more like a purchase than a perusal in the bookstore. When you download, you've actually taken the book home. When you peruse, you leave the book on the shelf and walk out of the store. There's clearly lots of gray here; what about people who buy books and then lend/give them to friends, etc? I guess that's what makes it interesting, at least to me. Take care, Donna ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary Otten" <maryotten@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 2:18 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: Bookshare's Purpose in Your Eyes > Hi Donna, > Just one other thing on the topic of the 100 books a month. I don't know about you. But I know I download books I'll probably never read, and certainly wouldn't pay for without knowing more about them. first, I might > start reading and discover that the book has too many errors in it, making it a pain. So I either delete and forget, or delete and if its one I really want, find a copy and scan for myself. Second, because of the way > Bookshare is organized, I try to keep current with the new submissions, downloading any that I see that I think might possibly be of interest to me at some point, knowing that, if I don't download it from new books, I'll > either have to make a note of its existence for later, or I'll probably forget about it. I may never read the book. So publishers shouldn't equate download statistics with book sales lost. Rather, a download is the > equivalent to a sighted person stopping in a bookstore and rifling through a book. Maybe they decide to buy and read; maybe they don't. Or maybe they go to the public library and borrow the book to read. For the > great majority of books that I have, I would say that I will not read them again. the fact that I can keep them after reading, rather than returning them to the library is just a bi-product of the way in which they were made > accessible. > Mary > > > >