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I'm very disturbed by the steady erosion of ownership that has been happening for the past few years. Subscription models are an attractive way to get some digi

I'm very disturbed by the steady erosion of ownership that has been happening for the past few years. Subscription models are an attractive way to get some digital content for a low price, whether it's music, software, movies, or books—but the internet has a notoriously short memory, and I fear that we're condemning ourselves to becoming cultural goldfish. I have books and records from my youth that sit on my shelf and are there for me any time I want to revisit them. Heck, I even have software from back then because I never got rid of my Apple II. Of course, there are emulators, and Spotify probably has 60%-70% of the records that are in my collection, and I can find A Wrinkle in Time on the Kindle. But how long is that guaranteed to be the case? And how can I be sure that the digital simulacrum are really the same as the originals, if the originals are gone? For the moment, it's an easy answer—just don't use the subscription services, and keep owning things. But will that always be an option? Why should ownership continue to be an option ten, twenty, or thirty years from now, when it's so much more attractive to companies to rent their products to you for a constant stream of monthly income? Will books end up getting unskippable "updates," or even being deleted at the whim of the publishers or Amazon one day?

yan 12y ago
I can fully understand your sentiment, and to some degree emotionally connect with it, but rationally: my entire bookshelf of computer science and literary classics has gone untouched since my initial read through the vast majority of books. I keep looking around and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the "ownership" aspect of books, or a lot of stuff in general. (Having moved three times during the last six years, moving books is an awful experience). This is probably an expression of what I've been feeling in general as of late, but I am extremely happy with the "subscriptionification" of media that's been happening. Spotify's huge library is a net win for me, as opposed to collecting albums for them to just collect dust. For me, revisiting what I used to listen to in high school by over-hearing someone's playlist has a far stronger emotional reaction than revisiting it by walking past a bookshelf. Regarding stuff disappearing ten, twenty, thirty years from now: my experpience has been the opposite. The Internet has been getting better and better and archiving content of yesterday, and has provided better and better access to it. My personal lean has been to own less stuff in general, which includes books, music and media in general. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited about Kindle Unlimited.
- greggman 12y ago
  I recently purged 60-70% of my book collection. I considered getting the remainder scanned from some place like $1 scan. I might have done it except that most of those books are picture books (art, architecture, photography, childrens). I feel like I'd be happy to let those go if I could get a non-scanned version (don't want scanned halftone dots, I want the original source). And if I had a lightweight 20+inch HD-DPI tablet to view them on. But yes, basically I wanted to get rid of "stuff". I have notebooks of DVDs and CDs, all of which are ripped. I only keep them as "proof of license"
- jaysonelliot 12y ago
  Show me anyone's MySpace profile from 2006. Tell me again how good the Internet's memory is.
  - yan 12y ago
    We, as a society, put a value on MySpace profiles from 2006. Good riddance.
  - jaysonelliot 12y ago
    The issue isn't about making a value judgment on what's worth having and what's not. Whether you like it or not, a person's social media profile is a part of their life. I'm sure you don't care about someone's photo album, or their diary, or the box full of concert ticket stubs they keep in their closet, either. But they matter to the person who kept them. Except that now, we've grown accustomed to keeping our personal memories on Facebook, or Twitter, and used to keep them on MySpace, Friendster, and LiveJournal. "Just back it all up" you could say—but how many average everyday people even know how to do that? The other day, I was looking for a podcast that I'd been on in 2010. Unfortunately, the site where it was hosted had undergone a refresh, and all content older than two years was gone. It reminded me just how quickly online content churns and disappears, and how even someone as backup-conscious as myself can lose digital media. There's so much good about the planet-wide accessibility of digital data, and it's certainly better to have, say, a podcast out there that might be on thousands of computers than a cassette tape that's going to be lost or damaged in your car. I'm simply saying that we should treat digital media as just as inviolate and permanent as physical media, and make it a better experience, not a more ephemeral one.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Shall we also get off thine lawn? Having big stacks of books in your home is a relatively recent phenomenon. People used to borrow them from the library or circulate them from person to person. Mass availability of inexpensive books has only been with us for 100 years or so. How do you know Jeff Bezos didn't tweak a couple of sentences in your Kindle copy of Catch 22? I don't know, but I do know that detecting such a change will be far, far easier with digital publications than it ever was with paper.
- jaysonelliot 12y ago
  "Get off my lawn" is an intellectually lazy argument. George Lucas has already famously done repeated "updates" to Star Wars. If it existed only in subscription form, you'd never be able to see the original.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    > George Lucas has already famously done repeated "updates" to Star Wars. If it existed only in subscription form, you'd never be able to see the original. Or, you might sign up for a service where access to more than one version is a differentiating feature, and get both for the same subscription price rather than having to buy multiple re-releases.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What makes you think Lucas would grant any service the license to distribute multiple versions?
  - dogecoinbase 12y ago
    There's also a subtle point here about accessibility of creative works that I think is often missed -- copyright, as a social contract, exists because society has a reason to provide creators with a period of economic exclusivity in exchange for the release of the work. There's no natural or defensible "right" to prevent people from copying. If a creator chooses to release their work in a format that they can retract (e.g. they can negate the societal benefit of the release), society is under no moral obligation to respect their copyright.
Joeri 12y ago
The purchasing model that amazon has isn't ownership either, it's rental with an indeterminate end date. Any time you cannot resell something or your children cannot inherit something, you don't own it. In some ways this kindle unlimited subscription is more honest, because it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.
NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Copyright infringement to the rescue! You can even have your cloud-like experiences with software like Plex and Calibre (though I like Plex better, it won't do plain ebooks). Audio books work well enough on Plex, and you can even share the server with friends if you want.
epaladin 12y ago
When that holographic storage media finally comes around, we'll just store a full copy of all of human knowledge in our pockets, and this won't really be a problem anymore. That's one possible solution at any rate.
JackC 12y ago
> ... when it's so much more attractive to companies to rent their products to you for a constant stream of monthly income? Which companies are you thinking of here? Amazon is still trying to drag book publishers into participating in this, and hasn't had much luck yet. Video subscriptions are more miss than hit. Spotify is the most mature, and (by your estimate) only has 60%-70% of what you want. And there's all kinds of complaints that Spotify doesn't result in the same kind of income that record sales did. I don't think the companies that own the products do like this model. The reason they do it at all is because it's an effective way to compete with illegal downloading. The $10/month doesn't represent the actual value of the product (which for me at least is probably higher), but seems to represent about what the market will tolerate before it goes back to just torrenting stuff. And that brings up a really good thing about these services: they address the market-efficiency losses of the copyright regime without needing to either break the law or change it. For example, suppose the only way to get an ebook is to buy it, and each book costs $X. There are a small number of ebooks you value at more than $X, you buy those ones, and (in economic terms) positive value is created by each exchange. But there is a much larger number of ebooks you value at more than $0 but less than $X. Those ones you would pay money for, and positive value would be created by that exchange, but the regime of "sell each ebook for $X" doesn't allow that value to be created. Piracy fully reclaims that value, but has its own problems. All-you-can-eat monthly services also fully reclaim the value (as long as you can afford them and they allow the use you had in mind), but in a way that is mutually agreeable to everybody involved. That makes them a good thing to have around. The real problem you're bringing up is that all-you-can-eat services don't allow some good and important uses, like saving stuff for later. But so far I'm not seeing any indication that they are replacing buy-it-and-own-it services -- or that content owners have any reason to want them to.
damontal 12y ago
>Will books end up getting unskippable "updates," or even being deleted at the whim of the publishers or Amazon one day? Amazon can already do this. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-cu...
- geoelectric 12y ago
  You're overlooking the followup where they restored access the next day, with a clarification that account closure isn't supposed to cut off access to your already-purchased content. http://www.dailydot.com/news/amazon-linn-nygaard-deleted-account-restored/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/amazon-linn-nygaard-deleted-acc...
gcb4 12y ago
i had the same shock you're displaying when i came to the us. "what do you mean your bank own your home? what if it goes under?" "what? you pay your car every month, are required to pay the most expensive insurance, and in the end the dealership still owns your car?" ... my guess is that in America anything that makes you pay a little less will have consumers. nobody cares about a bookcase full of old paper as you do. also i think that when the thing matures past the amateurs like EA we will see companies buying rights from other just like it happens with mortgage. apple went under with its flopped Newton watch? amazon buys all its drm licenses and continue to give you access to your media in hopes that your new purchases will come her way.
smacktoward 12y ago
I hear you on this, and am in sympathy with your point. But this bothers me less than Amazon selling Kindle books does, because at least this is clearly marked as rental. All your points are just as true about the Kindle books that Amazon sells to people -- you lose the right of first sale(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine), so you can't re-sell or lend your books; they're tied to a specific DRM scheme; they can be modified or "turned off" remotely without your consent; etc. -- only Amazon charges you a flat fee, as if you were actually purchasing it the way you purchase a physical book, which you aren't. You're just purchasing a limited license to access its content via specific devices. If they're going to be in the business of only selling limited licenses, I'd rather they do it via a subscription model, where every customer will understand that they'll lose access if they stop paying, than via a model designed to look and feel as much as possible like buying a real book. It's at least more honest that way.
- otakucode 12y ago
  Well, Amazon TELLS you that you lose the right of first sale. That has yet to be tested in court. EVERY industry (seriously, try to find one this isn't true for) has tried to kill the secondhand market in their particular corner of the economy. And every. single. one. of them failed utterly. Digital goods purveyors are going to fail just as spectacularly. It will require lawsuits, of course, but eventually digital property will be respected as actual property. Right now, when you purchase a digital good, you are quite literally paying for nothing. You're giving money to a company and basically asking them to do you a favor and give you access to some content. Nothing in the "license" you agree to obligates them to actually provide you with ANYTHING. It conveys absolutely no rights to the purchaser and, just as importantly, places absolutely no obligations on the "seller". As it currently stands, it's basically just a giant sham with consumers acting in good faith and waiting for some CEO at Amazon or Apple or Barnes and Noble or somesuch to try to eke out a little more quarterly profit by doing something like requiring consumers to pay more to unlock content they already "paid for".
  - zyxley 12y ago
    > to try to eke out a little more quarterly profit by doing something like requiring consumers to pay more to unlock content they already "paid for". The gaming industry has already done this kind of thing with on-disc DLC, incidentally.
baddox 12y ago
Other than some software, as far as I know you still have the option to "own" (ignoring copyright issues for the moment) most digital content. By "own" I mean "make a one-time purchase and then download the media onto your own device" as opposed to "pay a regular subscription fee and stream the media to your device." I think the "erosion" you observe is simply the phenomenon that many people genuinely prefer subscription models to one-time purchases, or perhaps they prefer to not manage their own files, syncing, etc. I don't think there's anything bad about that.
cnaut 12y ago
I think there is something to be said about the environmental impacts of ownership. As much as we love to own things, it isn't sustainable for the environment.
gingerlime 12y ago
I also share your sentiment. Completely. However, I think you're also underestimating the risk of all or parts of your stuff disappearing or getting destroyed in a house-burglary, fire, flood or another kind of disaster. I'm not entirely sure what the actual risks are, but my gut feeling is that there's a higher chance of losing what you physically own than for it to disappear or get 'updated' as a digital / for-rent product.
Alex_MJ 12y ago
Also, will books that aren't on Amazon cease to "exist"? There are a number of books I enjoyed in the paper era that I flat out can't find on Amazon now, and I tend to think of Amazon as "ALL THE BOOKS".
mwfunk 12y ago
I totally get what you're saying, but as I've gotten older all of my physical stuff (including books and music) has accumulated to the point where it's become more of a burden and a logistical PITA than a source of pride or pleasure to me. Up until my mid-30s, I was all about collecting and accumulating things, but since then (~10 years) I've been much more focused on minimizing the amount of physical things I own. The sheer volume of it became oppressive to me. Among other things, I stick to digital media whenever possible. I still own way too much stuff but at least it's kind of under control. It's all trade-offs, like just about anything in life. I give up some nice things by avoiding physical media, including all of the concerns you (and everyone else) are raising, but at this point in my life, what I get in return far outweighs what I'm losing. This applies to physical vs. digital media, and also to subscription vs. ownership models for digital goods. The weighting pros and cons for these things are different for different people.
api 12y ago
Any time I see something that is both interesting and obscure, like an article or a podcast, I have a tendency to packrat it. I have a USB RAID drive full of that stuff. It's a habit I've had for a while and it comes from exactly what you say: the Internet has a short memory.
jacalata 12y ago
Half of what I read as a kid came from the library (and by "the library" I mean any one of at least 7 systems) and went back a week later. Half the remainder came from thrift stores and was left back in there in boxes when we moved. How common is it to have a personal physical copy of all your childhood possessions? What's the demographic variation?
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Not just ownership, but rights in general, and even worse: the concept of individual independence and empowerment. There has been a consistent trend to portray the digital/online realm as a world apart from the "real" world, rather than, as is the truth, just another facet of it. This has facilitated massive erosions of civil liberties in the online world. Government censorship is the norm on the internet, not the exception. Warrantless monitoring and trespass on private systems and data by the government and law enforcement is also rampant, with few safeguards. In a similar vein, the protections of the rule of law and the criminal justice system are completely thrown out the window in many circumstances when it comes to the online realm. You can be effectively punished online merely due to an allegation (i.e. DMCA takedown), and often only arbitration is available as a remedy, erasing centuries of traditional protection for individual rights through the court system. And that's aside from the ongoing war over DRM and the desire of major content aggregators to deny ownership rights and privileges to customers. Add to that the growing reliance on paternalistic relationships with large corporations and business entities, eroding individualism. People rely on their ISPs and their cell carriers for access to the online world, a major aspect of modern business and private life. Unlike phone service these service providers have much greater leeway to decide what you can and cannot do online and have increasingly taken advantage of consumers. People rely on major services (gmail, hotmail, facebook, twitter, etc.) for their primary means of communication, services that in many cases border on unregulated monopolies. And at work people are increasingly dependent on their employers to provide medical and dental coverage, retirement savings, and so forth.
geoelectric 12y ago
As far as culture goes, I'd like to see mass archiving. I'm unclear whether what the Library of Congress does suffices, at least for the US, but a copy of everything should exist somewhere. As far as personal access goes, I hear you, but that's how I took myself into near-hoarder territory with media. I'm not too worried about subscription services becoming the only game in town. As long as some people will pay for permanent access of individual titles, or for value-adds like movie extras, someone will sell them. The bigger worry is the yanking of the access to stuff you've "bought," of course. But I suspect the first time someone with power either gets hurt or even scared by a DRM-related action, we'll get some mass decisions that come down to "if it looks like a sale and acts like a sale, it's a sale." You may or may not be able to resell or transfer it (legally), but I seriously doubt the courts will stand for someone arbitrarily taking it away. EULA or no EULA, there's a pretty fat implied promise there, and "buy" is used all over the place in language. That alone would be enough for the EU's courts to seriously hammer anyone who switched it up for "rent". The early software-related decisions around owning "licensed" copies were in the infancy of digital licensing, and there's plenty of room for reversal there. The VHS time-shifting/personal backup decision is much more in line with what I'd expect the theme to be over time. In particular, I expect format shifting to become legal as soon as a format shift or service closure screws someone with money/influence. Right now, the only real-world examples are video game console libraries, and they just don't garner the same sympathy because everyone's predisposed to the idea that software ages out with tech shifts. It'll be when iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, one of those does it that we'll see action.
findjashua 12y ago
I actually like the rental model for ebooks. The books I usually end up buying are hardcover anyway.
ripter 12y ago
After all the Snowden stuff, I worry that it makes it too easy to 'erase' troublesome books when no one actually owns them.
abhaga 12y ago
And it is all or none. If you fall on bad times and can't pay the subscription, you cannot have any books. Unlike your owned collection which you can reduce down to books you love. If you are low on cash, you cannot save and buy a book - you have to be subscribed all the time. If subscription becomes the dominant mode of book consumption, it would be disastrous. As an add on service, it is nice. Especially in the areas without strong library systems.
chmars 12y ago
I learnt to read before attending school by literally reading through my parents' bookshelves, the simpler books at first of course … today, I still have many books on shelves but all never books are digital and invisible, especially to children. In addition, digital content is not made for use in a family, it is usually linked to a single account …

yan 12y ago

I can fully understand your sentiment, and to some degree emotionally connect with it, but rationally: my entire bookshelf of computer science and literary classics has gone untouched since my initial read through the vast majority of books. I keep looking around and I'm not sure that I'm happy with the "ownership" aspect of books, or a lot of stuff in general. (Having moved three times during the last six years, moving books is an awful experience). This is probably an expression of what I've been feeling in general as of late, but I am extremely happy with the "subscriptionification" of media that's been happening. Spotify's huge library is a net win for me, as opposed to collecting albums for them to just collect dust. For me, revisiting what I used to listen to in high school by over-hearing someone's playlist has a far stronger emotional reaction than revisiting it by walking past a bookshelf. Regarding stuff disappearing ten, twenty, thirty years from now: my experpience has been the opposite. The Internet has been getting better and better and archiving content of yesterday, and has provided better and better access to it. My personal lean has been to own less stuff in general, which includes books, music and media in general. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited about Kindle Unlimited.

greggman 12y ago
I recently purged 60-70% of my book collection. I considered getting the remainder scanned from some place like $1 scan. I might have done it except that most of those books are picture books (art, architecture, photography, childrens). I feel like I'd be happy to let those go if I could get a non-scanned version (don't want scanned halftone dots, I want the original source). And if I had a lightweight 20+inch HD-DPI tablet to view them on. But yes, basically I wanted to get rid of "stuff". I have notebooks of DVDs and CDs, all of which are ripped. I only keep them as "proof of license"
jaysonelliot 12y ago
Show me anyone's MySpace profile from 2006. Tell me again how good the Internet's memory is.
- yan 12y ago
  We, as a society, put a value on MySpace profiles from 2006. Good riddance.
- jaysonelliot 12y ago
  The issue isn't about making a value judgment on what's worth having and what's not. Whether you like it or not, a person's social media profile is a part of their life. I'm sure you don't care about someone's photo album, or their diary, or the box full of concert ticket stubs they keep in their closet, either. But they matter to the person who kept them. Except that now, we've grown accustomed to keeping our personal memories on Facebook, or Twitter, and used to keep them on MySpace, Friendster, and LiveJournal. "Just back it all up" you could say—but how many average everyday people even know how to do that? The other day, I was looking for a podcast that I'd been on in 2010. Unfortunately, the site where it was hosted had undergone a refresh, and all content older than two years was gone. It reminded me just how quickly online content churns and disappears, and how even someone as backup-conscious as myself can lose digital media. There's so much good about the planet-wide accessibility of digital data, and it's certainly better to have, say, a podcast out there that might be on thousands of computers than a cassette tape that's going to be lost or damaged in your car. I'm simply saying that we should treat digital media as just as inviolate and permanent as physical media, and make it a better experience, not a more ephemeral one.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

Shall we also get off thine lawn? Having big stacks of books in your home is a relatively recent phenomenon. People used to borrow them from the library or circulate them from person to person. Mass availability of inexpensive books has only been with us for 100 years or so. How do you know Jeff Bezos didn't tweak a couple of sentences in your Kindle copy of Catch 22? I don't know, but I do know that detecting such a change will be far, far easier with digital publications than it ever was with paper.

jaysonelliot 12y ago
"Get off my lawn" is an intellectually lazy argument. George Lucas has already famously done repeated "updates" to Star Wars. If it existed only in subscription form, you'd never be able to see the original.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > George Lucas has already famously done repeated "updates" to Star Wars. If it existed only in subscription form, you'd never be able to see the original. Or, you might sign up for a service where access to more than one version is a differentiating feature, and get both for the same subscription price rather than having to buy multiple re-releases.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    What makes you think Lucas would grant any service the license to distribute multiple versions?
- dogecoinbase 12y ago
  There's also a subtle point here about accessibility of creative works that I think is often missed -- copyright, as a social contract, exists because society has a reason to provide creators with a period of economic exclusivity in exchange for the release of the work. There's no natural or defensible "right" to prevent people from copying. If a creator chooses to release their work in a format that they can retract (e.g. they can negate the societal benefit of the release), society is under no moral obligation to respect their copyright.

Joeri 12y ago

The purchasing model that amazon has isn't ownership either, it's rental with an indeterminate end date. Any time you cannot resell something or your children cannot inherit something, you don't own it. In some ways this kindle unlimited subscription is more honest, because it doesn't pretend to be something it isn't.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago

Copyright infringement to the rescue! You can even have your cloud-like experiences with software like Plex and Calibre (though I like Plex better, it won't do plain ebooks). Audio books work well enough on Plex, and you can even share the server with friends if you want.

epaladin 12y ago

When that holographic storage media finally comes around, we'll just store a full copy of all of human knowledge in our pockets, and this won't really be a problem anymore. That's one possible solution at any rate.

JackC 12y ago

> ... when it's so much more attractive to companies to rent their products to you for a constant stream of monthly income? Which companies are you thinking of here? Amazon is still trying to drag book publishers into participating in this, and hasn't had much luck yet. Video subscriptions are more miss than hit. Spotify is the most mature, and (by your estimate) only has 60%-70% of what you want. And there's all kinds of complaints that Spotify doesn't result in the same kind of income that record sales did. I don't think the companies that own the products do like this model. The reason they do it at all is because it's an effective way to compete with illegal downloading. The $10/month doesn't represent the actual value of the product (which for me at least is probably higher), but seems to represent about what the market will tolerate before it goes back to just torrenting stuff. And that brings up a really good thing about these services: they address the market-efficiency losses of the copyright regime without needing to either break the law or change it. For example, suppose the only way to get an ebook is to buy it, and each book costs $X. There are a small number of ebooks you value at more than $X, you buy those ones, and (in economic terms) positive value is created by each exchange. But there is a much larger number of ebooks you value at more than $0 but less than $X. Those ones you would pay money for, and positive value would be created by that exchange, but the regime of "sell each ebook for $X" doesn't allow that value to be created. Piracy fully reclaims that value, but has its own problems. All-you-can-eat monthly services also fully reclaim the value (as long as you can afford them and they allow the use you had in mind), but in a way that is mutually agreeable to everybody involved. That makes them a good thing to have around. The real problem you're bringing up is that all-you-can-eat services don't allow some good and important uses, like saving stuff for later. But so far I'm not seeing any indication that they are replacing buy-it-and-own-it services -- or that content owners have any reason to want them to.

damontal 12y ago

>Will books end up getting unskippable "updates," or even being deleted at the whim of the publishers or Amazon one day? Amazon can already do this. http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-customers-kindle-deletes-account http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/oct/22/amazon-wipes-cu...

geoelectric 12y ago
You're overlooking the followup where they restored access the next day, with a clarification that account closure isn't supposed to cut off access to your already-purchased content. http://www.dailydot.com/news/amazon-linn-nygaard-deleted-account-restored/ http://www.dailydot.com/news/amazon-linn-nygaard-deleted-acc...

gcb4 12y ago

i had the same shock you're displaying when i came to the us. "what do you mean your bank own your home? what if it goes under?" "what? you pay your car every month, are required to pay the most expensive insurance, and in the end the dealership still owns your car?" ... my guess is that in America anything that makes you pay a little less will have consumers. nobody cares about a bookcase full of old paper as you do. also i think that when the thing matures past the amateurs like EA we will see companies buying rights from other just like it happens with mortgage. apple went under with its flopped Newton watch? amazon buys all its drm licenses and continue to give you access to your media in hopes that your new purchases will come her way.

smacktoward 12y ago

I hear you on this, and am in sympathy with your point. But this bothers me less than Amazon selling Kindle books does, because at least this is clearly marked as rental. All your points are just as true about the Kindle books that Amazon sells to people -- you lose the right of first sale(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine), so you can't re-sell or lend your books; they're tied to a specific DRM scheme; they can be modified or "turned off" remotely without your consent; etc. -- only Amazon charges you a flat fee, as if you were actually purchasing it the way you purchase a physical book, which you aren't. You're just purchasing a limited license to access its content via specific devices. If they're going to be in the business of only selling limited licenses, I'd rather they do it via a subscription model, where every customer will understand that they'll lose access if they stop paying, than via a model designed to look and feel as much as possible like buying a real book. It's at least more honest that way.

otakucode 12y ago
Well, Amazon TELLS you that you lose the right of first sale. That has yet to be tested in court. EVERY industry (seriously, try to find one this isn't true for) has tried to kill the secondhand market in their particular corner of the economy. And every. single. one. of them failed utterly. Digital goods purveyors are going to fail just as spectacularly. It will require lawsuits, of course, but eventually digital property will be respected as actual property. Right now, when you purchase a digital good, you are quite literally paying for nothing. You're giving money to a company and basically asking them to do you a favor and give you access to some content. Nothing in the "license" you agree to obligates them to actually provide you with ANYTHING. It conveys absolutely no rights to the purchaser and, just as importantly, places absolutely no obligations on the "seller". As it currently stands, it's basically just a giant sham with consumers acting in good faith and waiting for some CEO at Amazon or Apple or Barnes and Noble or somesuch to try to eke out a little more quarterly profit by doing something like requiring consumers to pay more to unlock content they already "paid for".
- zyxley 12y ago
  > to try to eke out a little more quarterly profit by doing something like requiring consumers to pay more to unlock content they already "paid for". The gaming industry has already done this kind of thing with on-disc DLC, incidentally.

baddox 12y ago

Other than some software, as far as I know you still have the option to "own" (ignoring copyright issues for the moment) most digital content. By "own" I mean "make a one-time purchase and then download the media onto your own device" as opposed to "pay a regular subscription fee and stream the media to your device." I think the "erosion" you observe is simply the phenomenon that many people genuinely prefer subscription models to one-time purchases, or perhaps they prefer to not manage their own files, syncing, etc. I don't think there's anything bad about that.

cnaut 12y ago

I think there is something to be said about the environmental impacts of ownership. As much as we love to own things, it isn't sustainable for the environment.

gingerlime 12y ago

I also share your sentiment. Completely. However, I think you're also underestimating the risk of all or parts of your stuff disappearing or getting destroyed in a house-burglary, fire, flood or another kind of disaster. I'm not entirely sure what the actual risks are, but my gut feeling is that there's a higher chance of losing what you physically own than for it to disappear or get 'updated' as a digital / for-rent product.

Alex_MJ 12y ago

Also, will books that aren't on Amazon cease to "exist"? There are a number of books I enjoyed in the paper era that I flat out can't find on Amazon now, and I tend to think of Amazon as "ALL THE BOOKS".

mwfunk 12y ago

I totally get what you're saying, but as I've gotten older all of my physical stuff (including books and music) has accumulated to the point where it's become more of a burden and a logistical PITA than a source of pride or pleasure to me. Up until my mid-30s, I was all about collecting and accumulating things, but since then (~10 years) I've been much more focused on minimizing the amount of physical things I own. The sheer volume of it became oppressive to me. Among other things, I stick to digital media whenever possible. I still own way too much stuff but at least it's kind of under control. It's all trade-offs, like just about anything in life. I give up some nice things by avoiding physical media, including all of the concerns you (and everyone else) are raising, but at this point in my life, what I get in return far outweighs what I'm losing. This applies to physical vs. digital media, and also to subscription vs. ownership models for digital goods. The weighting pros and cons for these things are different for different people.

api 12y ago

Any time I see something that is both interesting and obscure, like an article or a podcast, I have a tendency to packrat it. I have a USB RAID drive full of that stuff. It's a habit I've had for a while and it comes from exactly what you say: the Internet has a short memory.

jacalata 12y ago

Half of what I read as a kid came from the library (and by "the library" I mean any one of at least 7 systems) and went back a week later. Half the remainder came from thrift stores and was left back in there in boxes when we moved. How common is it to have a personal physical copy of all your childhood possessions? What's the demographic variation?

InclinedPlane 12y ago

Not just ownership, but rights in general, and even worse: the concept of individual independence and empowerment. There has been a consistent trend to portray the digital/online realm as a world apart from the "real" world, rather than, as is the truth, just another facet of it. This has facilitated massive erosions of civil liberties in the online world. Government censorship is the norm on the internet, not the exception. Warrantless monitoring and trespass on private systems and data by the government and law enforcement is also rampant, with few safeguards. In a similar vein, the protections of the rule of law and the criminal justice system are completely thrown out the window in many circumstances when it comes to the online realm. You can be effectively punished online merely due to an allegation (i.e. DMCA takedown), and often only arbitration is available as a remedy, erasing centuries of traditional protection for individual rights through the court system. And that's aside from the ongoing war over DRM and the desire of major content aggregators to deny ownership rights and privileges to customers. Add to that the growing reliance on paternalistic relationships with large corporations and business entities, eroding individualism. People rely on their ISPs and their cell carriers for access to the online world, a major aspect of modern business and private life. Unlike phone service these service providers have much greater leeway to decide what you can and cannot do online and have increasingly taken advantage of consumers. People rely on major services (gmail, hotmail, facebook, twitter, etc.) for their primary means of communication, services that in many cases border on unregulated monopolies. And at work people are increasingly dependent on their employers to provide medical and dental coverage, retirement savings, and so forth.

geoelectric 12y ago

As far as culture goes, I'd like to see mass archiving. I'm unclear whether what the Library of Congress does suffices, at least for the US, but a copy of everything should exist somewhere. As far as personal access goes, I hear you, but that's how I took myself into near-hoarder territory with media. I'm not too worried about subscription services becoming the only game in town. As long as some people will pay for permanent access of individual titles, or for value-adds like movie extras, someone will sell them. The bigger worry is the yanking of the access to stuff you've "bought," of course. But I suspect the first time someone with power either gets hurt or even scared by a DRM-related action, we'll get some mass decisions that come down to "if it looks like a sale and acts like a sale, it's a sale." You may or may not be able to resell or transfer it (legally), but I seriously doubt the courts will stand for someone arbitrarily taking it away. EULA or no EULA, there's a pretty fat implied promise there, and "buy" is used all over the place in language. That alone would be enough for the EU's courts to seriously hammer anyone who switched it up for "rent". The early software-related decisions around owning "licensed" copies were in the infancy of digital licensing, and there's plenty of room for reversal there. The VHS time-shifting/personal backup decision is much more in line with what I'd expect the theme to be over time. In particular, I expect format shifting to become legal as soon as a format shift or service closure screws someone with money/influence. Right now, the only real-world examples are video game console libraries, and they just don't garner the same sympathy because everyone's predisposed to the idea that software ages out with tech shifts. It'll be when iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, one of those does it that we'll see action.

findjashua 12y ago

I actually like the rental model for ebooks. The books I usually end up buying are hardcover anyway.

ripter 12y ago

After all the Snowden stuff, I worry that it makes it too easy to 'erase' troublesome books when no one actually owns them.

abhaga 12y ago

And it is all or none. If you fall on bad times and can't pay the subscription, you cannot have any books. Unlike your owned collection which you can reduce down to books you love. If you are low on cash, you cannot save and buy a book - you have to be subscribed all the time. If subscription becomes the dominant mode of book consumption, it would be disastrous. As an add on service, it is nice. Especially in the areas without strong library systems.

chmars 12y ago

I learnt to read before attending school by literally reading through my parents' bookshelves, the simpler books at first of course … today, I still have many books on shelves but all never books are digital and invisible, especially to children. In addition, digital content is not made for use in a family, it is usually linked to a single account …