E-book readers attract unwanted VAT

Books essential?

C'm on, Sunshine. You'll tell me next cars are, dentures are, television is. "Essential" is if you can exist without it/them. Food/air/water/warm clothing/shelter falls into the realm of "essential". Not a weighty tome, or even a library.

Don't be daft, man.

Square root of -1

i, or j, is not the result of calculating the square root of -1 (which is impossible).

i, or j, simply represent the square root of -1.

Where would you like your books?

While it's not likely that someone would want tens, hundreds or even thousands of books on a train journey they may want to own a large number of books -- where would you suggest someone store hundreds or thousands of real books? We don't all have houses large enough for libraries you know.

That's forgetting the fact that, for example, carrying a book in a language foreign to yourself and a dictionary may be a little heavier than carrying one ebook.

You may not personally benefit from ebooks, but I would have thought you could appreciate why others might.

Not sorry at all

For the same reason that many people have a few days worth of music on an MP3 player that only has a day's battery life.

I have about 50 books on my reader right now. I'm still only reading one at a time, but if the storage is there, why not. And if I am delayed somewhere, and I have my reader with me, running out of book is not a problem.

Seriously.. The storage thing is nice, but not a huge advantage. The ability to carry a a big thick book in a device that is about a centimetre thick is nice too, but even that is not the killer feature.

The killer feature.. For me at least, is the ability to change the font size. Something you don't appreciate until your eyes start going. And the huge amount of free (and legal) books out there is not bad either.

Stuck on the proverbial desert island?

(see title)

Poor rationale..

"How can a Gummint impose that with legal download (Gutenberg)"

VAT is a percentage of sale price ("value" added tax is a misnomer). 17.5% of free = 0. And 0 tax is easy to collect.

"and illegal D/L"

Hmmm... Last time I checked, the plague of drug-fuelled happy-slapping hoodie-shoplifters terrorising our inner cities (as defined by the Daily Mail) hadn't caused the government to abolish VAT on the items most commonly shoplifted....

I was about to say something similar

But don't forget that processing wood pulp to paper is actually quite a chemically intense process. There is a huge amount of bleaching that goes on and quite a lot of energy is used.

Indeed similar to any crop such as wheat the paper locks up the CO2 until it ultimately degrades. With wheat that will happen fairly quickly as we eat our cereal but for a book there is a good chance that it will sit on a shelf for years or decades locking up the CO2 in the process.

I'd suggest you do not ignore the pollution involved in manufacture of the reader. Then the fact that it takes some energy just to keep the thing lit up to be able to read the 'book' that would otherwise cost nothing to read in paper version means it keeps on polluting (arguably not by very much).

I'd be curious to know if there has been a proper life cycle analysis comparing a paper book to a digital book.

Domesday (not "doom"sday <g>)

There's an official project for a PC-based reader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

There is a working one in the hands of a fellow Acorn enthusiast:

http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Computers/Domesday.html

(complete with more details than you ever needed to know...)

It is still around, and the data (which I believe to be largely analogue) is still available, so it isn't dead yet. It might be "largely unavailable", but then I've never seen the real domesday book...

VAT on clothes

The article is right, no VAT on children's clothes only, adult clothes are VAT rated. Of course whether an item is for children or adults is set purely by size and so it does bring in the anomaly whereby a larger child has to pay VAT on their clothes, but a smaller adult may not.

con

>Firstly I would argue that e-books are non-essential

All e-books just because they are electronic?

So a nursing manual as an e-book is non essential but a Jeffery Archer on paper is?

Or do we setup a dept to go through each book deciding if its essential or not?

The 'essential' test was the result of an early test case which greatly expanded VAT's reach. It is easier to include something in the VAT rules by showing it is not essential than it is to force something to have VAT by proving its a 'luxury'.

Well.

"Anyway, e books aren't books. A book is a thing you can give or lend or sell on. You can't do that with e books because vendors will want to keep as much control as possible,"

Just because vendors don't allow ebooks to be lent (well, in the main anyway) and resold, is not the ebook's fault.

As you correctly say, the current near fatal flaw with eBooks is that the vendors are being greedy. Their margins must be huge on these things. They haven't learnt a thing from the music industry. The one thing that stops me buying ebooks is their ridiculously high price.

What really gets my goat is that they continue with the ridiculous notion of hardback pricing on a electronic medium. The ebook comes out at £15 and then 6 months later drops to £6.99 for exactly the same file! Paper hardbacks are genuinely a different product from the paperback.

Unless ebooks become affordable, they will continue to fizzle as they have done for years.