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> Services are something you lease and use for a specific period and you never own. Yes. This is the reality of ebooks, downloaded music, and online games. An

by pm24601 12y ago

> Services are something you lease and use for a specific period and you never own. Yes. This is the reality of ebooks, downloaded music, and online games. Anything with a TOS attached to it is a service. We are a society of renters - never able to actual own something, but yet we pay the dollars and delude ourselves that we "own" DRMed ebooks and music.

vinceguidry 12y ago
I don't think of my ebooks as purchased knowledge. I think of them the same way I think of articles I read online. I just pay for these and they take somewhat longer to read. If they disappeared the second I finished the last page, 99% of the time I wouldn't miss them. If I could pay less money for a temporal copy, I would, but the marketplaces and UX for borrowed books are completely inferior to buying on Kindle, such that I pay the price premium. I can't complain too much, I can't expect the market to create a perfect solution for my niche use case. As it is, books make up a tiny percentage of my spending. If I'd needed to refer back to it often, I'd buy a hard copy, and have a handful such hard copies of technical books. I rarely crack any of them open, the Internet provides all. The only hard copy I have that I've read in its entirety is Metaprogramming Ruby 2. I'm starting to think of consuming information as applying an 'insight delta' to your brain. Trying to actually hold facts and stuff is foolish, the Internet does that sort of thing much better than your brain does. So concrete information gets shuffled out after awhile, which is fine for my purposes. The stuff I'm dealing with every day, like how to refactor what kinds of code, that stays with me.
- pm24601 12y ago
  You are think of just technical books. You are in the tech/SF bubble. How many tech books make it to the NYTimes best seller list? Zero. Or any best seller list? Zero. Most books sold are not "knowledge books" - they are fiction, cookbooks, self-help, etc. I have fiction books from years ago that I still re-read on occasion. Which is not possible with DRMed ebooks.

by pm24601 12y ago

vinceguidry 12y ago

I don't think of my ebooks as purchased knowledge. I think of them the same way I think of articles I read online. I just pay for these and they take somewhat longer to read. If they disappeared the second I finished the last page, 99% of the time I wouldn't miss them. If I could pay less money for a temporal copy, I would, but the marketplaces and UX for borrowed books are completely inferior to buying on Kindle, such that I pay the price premium. I can't complain too much, I can't expect the market to create a perfect solution for my niche use case. As it is, books make up a tiny percentage of my spending. If I'd needed to refer back to it often, I'd buy a hard copy, and have a handful such hard copies of technical books. I rarely crack any of them open, the Internet provides all. The only hard copy I have that I've read in its entirety is Metaprogramming Ruby 2. I'm starting to think of consuming information as applying an 'insight delta' to your brain. Trying to actually hold facts and stuff is foolish, the Internet does that sort of thing much better than your brain does. So concrete information gets shuffled out after awhile, which is fine for my purposes. The stuff I'm dealing with every day, like how to refactor what kinds of code, that stays with me.

pm24601 12y ago
You are think of just technical books. You are in the tech/SF bubble. How many tech books make it to the NYTimes best seller list? Zero. Or any best seller list? Zero. Most books sold are not "knowledge books" - they are fiction, cookbooks, self-help, etc. I have fiction books from years ago that I still re-read on occasion. Which is not possible with DRMed ebooks.