One of the reasons people buy physical books is the ability to read them in hand. Now everyone might use a tablet or mobile phone, even the PC, to read digital books at their own leisure.
However, one of the other assets of a physical book is the ability to loan them out to a friend.
At the current level, account holders are able to download their books only to their own devices. Not many people would loan out a device so another could read. This leads me to a different suggestion which I might want to see in a much later upgrade to the Logos application.
The sales pitch of Logos is always comparing price to a physical hard-bound/paper-bound book in value. What if in the Logos community we were to have friends who would create accounts and we could loan out a digital book for x-amount of days. This would mean that the resource we ourselves purchased when on loan would restrict our own access to the digital book, but it could be accessed by our friend.
I am thinking this could be a possibility, but would be a radical upgrade to each and every digital book as I think it would require a unique encryption to the account holder for each digital book.
Also, Beneficiary. I know I have had a beneficiary noted to my account in cased I were to die when I first went to Iraq. My first beneficiary had an account with logos but didn't have as much as me. Now I think that beneficiary on his own has an account that is equal to my own, so what good would it do to bequeath my account? I've since bequeathed it to someone who does not use Logos, but this person uses a different inferior competitor. I think that if one were to have a beneficiary on the account, that what books one owns in a digital library if the beneficiary has those books in their own account should be able to gain only the books that person does not own in their own account. The books that are shared could be donated to say a non-profit organization so they can increase their copyright usage onto multiple computers within a school or center.
I am just putting this out there as a suggestion. Something of this scale might be ready or created in a much later Logos system. I think this kind of suggestion would produce two things:
1) it would increase more potential clients who consider Logos to be pricey and refrain any consideration from using it on that basis and settle with their competitor software package. The use of loaning one's books would increase potential clients.
2) it would also benefit account holders as we "brag" about Logos and want to show others the benefits of Logos, but presently cannot because the people who only have free access accounts cannot be loaned out digital books to test if they want that particular digital book.
CONS:
1) loaning out a digital book read by another upon reading may not be considered a book worth having, and so some digital books sales might decrease having the consumer already read it and consider it a resource not worth having. Sort of like one goes to the movies and watches it once, but would never purchase it on DVD, or another is uncertain to even watch it in the movies and so waits for it years later to be on cable or on a television "world premiere" night and so loaning books might produce in others the desire not to purchase that one book.
however, that con would mean that one is more concerned about the sale of digital books rather than satisfying consumers who want to own a digital library that only contains what they really want.
I am sure there are other consideration both pros and cons. It is why I wanted to put it in the forum for discussion. I think the encryption would be fairly sophisticated and with sophistication comes coding bugs that would require updates. So I don't think it would happen anytime soon, but I think it might be worth a future application of Logos.
Sincerely, Stephen Brace
