I don’t understand the debate about book ownership, cause for me its not about owning the books, its about reading them. Remember Shirkey’s essay on reading vs. collecting??
Books are about 10 bucks each, or less, on the Kindle. Price of a trip to the drive-through. Eat it, read it, enjoy it, and let it go… :)
No. Some of the best books I’ve read are ones that my parents bought decades ago and passed on to me when I was old enough. Some of the books I read are ones like to come back to months or years later to re-read. Hell, some of the books I own are just beautiful as objects.
Even if you disregard all of these, the simple fact is that Amazon is lying to its customers. The small print on the website says that you’re paying for a license to read the book, but everything else — their marketing, the button on their website, the order confirmation — tells customers that they’re “buying” the book. When we think of property we’re accustomed to thinking of it in terms of the doctrine of first sale: once we’ve bought something it’s ours do keep, re-sell or loan to others as we please. Amazon is being deliberately deceitful and exploiting that set of assumptions, to make people forget that they’re only paying for a revokable license to read the book. People who want to borrow the books from a library will do so; Amazon’s customers are there because thgy want to — and believe they can — buy a copy to keep.