No, You Don't Really Own Your eBooks

And whoever owns the digital rights has the authority to delete them. Which may partly explain why sales of ebooks have stalled and sales of actual books are on the rise. JL

John Warner reports in the Chicago Tribune:

Disappearing content has become normalized in the age of streaming content. The reason is  digital rights management, or DRM, which has now become a way for companies to wall you into their particular garden. It’s the reason why a Kindle book cannot be read on a Nook, and vice versa. You are not buying a copy but a license subject to whatever restrictions the company would like to set. It’s possible you do own some of the digital books you’ve  bought because some titles are sold without DRM, but my hunch is you have no idea which ones those are and probably didn’t pay any attention one way or another at the time of purchase.

While my book recommending skills are truly legendary, to the point of approaching the mystical — this is why I call myself the Biblioracle, after all — this is not my only predictive talent.

In fact, for every single reader, regardless of age, gender, location, height or hair color, I can tell how many Kindle, Nook and Apple iBooks they own.

The answer is zero. You, me, them, everybody, own exactly zero of these books.

The reality of this was recently highlighted by the impending demise of the Microsoft Store books section, which stopped new sales in early April and will soon start removing the books from devices, never to be seen again.

Microsoft will be offering a refund for books purchased and an extra $25 if the copies were annotated or marked up, but this would be cold comfort to a scholar who went digital and planned on using those marked-up texts in a research project or course.

Writing at Wired, Brian Barrett calls it a Microsoft e-book “apocalypse” which may sound extreme, but isn’t wrong. The reason the story isn’t dominating news cycles is because it doesn’t seem as though very many people were buying books through Microsoft.

But imagine if something similar were happening with Amazon’s e-books, the retailer of choice for the vast majority of digital texts.

It would be a true apocalypse if we lived in a world in which physical books were not still vital. It would force us to return to the oral storytelling tradition of centuries of yore. Our new Homer would be whoever could remember what happened in “The DaVinci Code.”

I jest, but we shouldn’t take this as a laughing matter. Amazon is seemingly unlikely to stop selling e-books — they make money on it, after all — but what if they get into an intractable dispute over pricing with a particular publisher, and as an act of leverage, not only stop selling the publisher’s wares in the store (as has happened temporarily in the past), but delete previously purchased copies from individual devices?

Maybe that sounds unlikely too, but the reality is that both the technology and the law allows this to happen.

The reason is something called digital rights management, or DRM, which was the approach settled on to combat piracy (remember Napster?) but has now become a way for companies to wall you into their particular garden. It’s the reason why a Kindle book cannot be read on a Nook, and vice versa.

Under DRM, you are not buying a copy but a license, a license subject to whatever restrictions the company empowered to issue that license would like to set. I exaggerated a bit up the page: It’s possible you do own some of the digital books you’ve previously bought because some titles are sold without DRM protections, but my hunch is you have no idea which ones those are and probably didn’t pay any attention one way or another at the time of purchase.

Disappearing content has become normalized in the age of streaming content, a la Netflix or Spotify. We understand that what is present one day may not be there the next.

But are we prepared to accept the same conditions for books?

I don’t know about you, but I’m of the better-safe-than-sorry school. If I read a book in a digital format that I’m pretty sure I want to have access to at some future point, I go buy a paper copy.