No justification for such a huge jump was offered, but since one of the constituent members of ZPÜ is the German music collection society GEMA, which seems to have an unlimited sense of entitlement when it comes to demanding money from the public, that's hardly a surprise.

In particular, no rationale is given for including memory cards, which are used almost exclusively in cameras to record content produced by end-users -- so the idea that the levy is somehow justified as a way of compensating creators for revenue supposedly "lost" by piracy is manifestly absurd.

Basically, this outdated and insulting approach treats all Germans using digital storage as if they were pirates. Of course, arbitrarily imposing 2000% tax hikes on storage is probably the quickest way to turn them into something much more dangerous to GEMA and its friends: ardent supporters of the German Pirate Party....

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I'm at a loss as to what this is supposed to accomplish. Kindle books are DRM-controlled regardless of how they are transmitted, so it has no impact on the potential for piracy. Presumably Penguin thinks this will spur more readers to buy rather than borrow, but in reality it has just created consumer confusion and angry backlash.

Of course, this isn't the first time a publisher has tried to place arbitrary restrictions on ebook lending. It's an especially frustrating trend, because the entire concept of "lending" ebooks is already one big artificial restriction. When will content companies learn that courting customers is about adding value, not taking it away?