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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 6087432" data-attributes="member: 19675">Apples and oranges.  Its the difference between renting an apartment and buying a house: its two similar but very different bundles of rights being transferred from one party to another.Posession of a physical book is usually acquired via a sale- an irrevocable transaction.  Most electronic files transfer the right of possession and use only via a license, which is, and always had been, a revocable transaction.  That economic battle was lost when people kept paying for licenses instead of demanding actual transfers of ownership.  And because there has been no large vocal and consistent demand for actual sales of programs & data, no business I can think of has attempted to use the sales business model in electronic data.Its one of the reasons I buy CDs and not lease mp3s from iTunes or anyone else.And this isn't new to the electronic age.  License type agreements are ancient, and they are everywhere.  Actual ownership of property is, historically speaking, comparatively rare, and only in the modern age has it become so commonplace that everybody enjoy those kinds of rights.IOW, the reason it is allowed is because that is the nature of the contracts we have been agreeing to.  If (however unlikely) everyone in the computer market decided they would no longer agree to licensing software & files and instead demanded true sales- and actually stuck to that resolve, refusing to pay for updates to software, getting the latest games, buying the newest hardware, etc.- the companies doing the programming would either have to go with a true sales model or shutter their doors.But that ISN'T going to happen.For one thing, the licensing model lets us get things cheaper (short term) than if we buy them.  Some of my law books were $400 each.  Used.  That's for something I'd only need for a semester or two, and it was a rare class that only used one book.  A licensed electronic version today might only cost $20 a semester.Who would be getting in line for upgraded software every couple of years if you only got the same utility advances you get under a licensing agreement if each iteration cost 10-20x for a sale?Also, things that are licensed tend towards more uniformity of quality and functionality than thongs that are sold.  If I want to buy an electric guitar from Gibson or its subsidiaries, I can spend anywhere from $100 to $35,000.  At every stage, you will find variances in the quality of materials used and overall quality control.There really isn't the same kind of variance in Microsoft Office.</blockquote>

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