e-Books aren’t owned, they’re licensed. There are various reasons for this policy (on the part of publishers) which has some serious consequences for both consumers and culture. On the consumer side, it enables device lock-in and makes e-books more ephemeral (your device could die or your vendor could stop supporting it). On the culture side, it largely erases books from physical history and diminishes the creation of “hybrid value” brought to books by readers and communities.
In most cases, when you buy an e-book, you are actually getting a license to read it, not genuine ownership. This is the case with nearly all e-book distributors, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Google, the coy elephant debutante of the e-book world, has been careful in their formal language to talk about “providing access” to books, rather than selling them, suggesting that their cross-platform cloud-based solution will take this even further.
There are many reasons for the trend away from ownership:
- publishers think digital copyrights are barely worth the paper they aren’t written on, believing licenses (together with DRM) give them more protection from revenue loss through piracy and fair use;
- special restrictions are more easily included in licenses (e.g. no resale, no robo-read-aloud, device limitations, etc);
- those restrictions can give more flexibility in pricing models, which is how publishers recover investment in a largely speculative business;
- licensing opens the way for other revenue models, like subscriptions, for publishers and distributors to explore;
- licensing is the norm in the software world and the rest of the digital media world, partially to restrict rights for consumers and liability for vendors.
It would be nice to believe that ownership and licensing are equivalent for consumers, since both come down to “you pay and you read”. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. Some of the consumer consequences include:
- vendor lock-in: I can’t read my Kindle book on my Nook (or my Linux netbook);
- 1984 redux: Amazon could (ironically) delete copies of 1984 from buyers’ digital shelves because those buyers (probably) lived in nations where they had fewer rights than people in other places (1984 is out of copyright in some parts of the world but not in the US, due to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act);
- no sharing: I can’t lend my e-book to a friend or family member; even the Nook’s much-touted sharing features are extremely limited (you can share a book exactly once and only if the publisher allows);
- ephemerality: if a vendor goes away (either entirely or in part) and your e-book is under DRM, you will have “access” to a very random string of bytes (of course, Google and Adobe and Amazon are too big to fail, right?)
Given these issues for the consumer, I’m surprised that I buy e-books in the volume that I do. But the convenience is compelling (a roomful of books in my briefcase) and I’m gambling that the market will drive some of the deficits away while grandfathering in my digital investment to date. But the end of ownership has consequences for intellectual culture that are more serious, especially the diminishing of intellectual history and hybrid value.
Book ownership is one foundation of intellectual history for both individuals and the culture. The books on our shelves constitute a history of our learning and thinking; our own shelves can yield reflection, insight, and inspiration; browsing someone else’s shelves can offer us a glimpse of their minds. Though browsing a digital shelf might give the same opportunities (or potentially better ones!) for reflection and disclosure, their reliance on cloud-based data could make that impossible. Repressive regimes make a big deal out of burning books as a way to cement their domination, and the end of ownership will make that even easier (with a reduced carbon footprint, of course).
In his 2009 op-ed piece defending the controversial Google Books’ Settlement, Sergey Brin compared their effort to saving the Library of Alexandria. Ironically, the swathes and swatches of knowledge which survived that ancient calamity did so because there were many copies (some translations) of the works in many places. Ownership, physically at least, saved the day and gave us what survived.
A second casualty of the end of ownership is to the creation of hybrid value by readers. When I buy a book, my rights to the book (to mark up, to lend, to hang on to, to be found by future generations, to resell), allow me to add value to that book for myself and my community. A book that I can talk about with friends is more interesting than a book just for my personal enjoyment. A book that I (or a student, child, or friend) can return to in 10 years has more value than is contained in the moment of reading. The five musty volumes of “Tom Swift” I found in my grandparents’ attic touched me more than the complete set that I now have on my Kindle. It’s not just about accessibility, but about personal relevance.
Hybrid value is what enables serious intellectual discourse. Academic publication, with its lists and chains of references, was the original “remix culture” where the value of a contribution included the vitality of its intellectual offspring. In principle, digital technologies should make this discourse even richer and, in the short term, technologies like “Google Scholar” have been boons to conversation and scholarship. But the end of ownership puts the traditions of distributed intellectual stewardship at risk.
What to do? Here are a few ideas and I’d love to hear more:
- embrace open and common standards for packaging (e.g. epub .vs. mobi/azw);
- insist on vendor-independent “survivable” DRM (often social DRM) or no DRM at all;
- create frameworks for capturing and sharing user added value (that’s what we’re trying to do with sBooks);
- personally backup your cloud-stored e-books in anticipation of either distributor disaster or improved openness.
March 3, 2010 at 6:59 pm |
[...] Here’s an interesting article in a blog all about ebooks; this entry explains the drawbacks of the ebook licensing-rather-than-owning model. [...]