Music was this way for a while. Then the industry did what we'd been pleading them to do since the late 90s: Embrace digital distribution. Pandora appeared, th

Music was this way for a while. Then the industry did what we'd been pleading them to do since the late 90s: Embrace digital distribution. Pandora appeared, then Spotify, and it became easier to go legit than to maintain a big library of pirated content. $15/mo was absolutely worth not having to worry about my ISP forwarding a DMCA notice someday, or to hassle with making sure my ID3 tags were right, or synchronizing the collection across my desktop and laptop and mobile. One Spotify worked everywhere, and I completely gave up piracy. Then some chinks appeared in the armor. Spotify turns out to suck, tracks would just randomly vanish (gray-out) from my playlists because some artist pulled a distribution deal. The support forums are an absolute wasteland of "implied #WONTFIX by profound neglect". They got into podcasting and made some questionable choices with regard to misinformation, and even more artists left. So now I'm on Deezer and it also sucks but in different and less-egregious ways. I'm back to maintaining a local stash of mp3's for certain stuff that I just can't find on streaming. (I'm paying for them now, because it turns out Bandcamp scratches that itch in the majority of cases, but the hassle factor is still there.) TV and movies were this way for a while. Then Netflix stepped up and basically made everything awesome. One payment, a world of content. Why pirate anymore? Then a dozen-plus other streaming services proliferated and fragmented the landscape, and it turns out Netflix hates Linux viewers, and so on. (I completely gave up caring about TV and movies some time ago, so this is all based on hearsay. It was easier to _remove myself from an entire art form_ than deal with the industry that controls it. Admit that wash-basin.) Are ebooks on a similar trajectory?