Thursday, March 26, 2009
Access vs. Ownership
I am not the least bit interested in paying for an ebook reader, or for ebooks, but I did download the free Kindle app for my phone last week, along with one of the free public domain books that are available form Amazon. It’s nice to have a book in my pocketbook, but only as a pinch-hitter. I have been thinking about ebooks and readers a lot lately, so it was interesting to see this article from the Christian Science Monitor about what we lose when we choose the electronic version of a book over the paper one. The author feels that we trade ownership for access, when we make that choice, and that access is far inferior to ownership. I am not sure that I feel so strongly about that, as a principle, though. After all, I am not making just that choice every time I borrow a book from the library, instead of buying it? The difference is, of course, that in the case of the Kindle, the access isn’t free. It’s like paying $360 for a library card, and then paying another $10 or so for every book I borrow. Sure, I could read it over and over, for as long as the Kindle works, but I am not much of a re-reader. The truth is that someone is making a lot of money off our access. The author of the article invokes the golden light of 2.0, but I don’t think that we have fewer rights to edit and share the text we get digitally than what we have to edit and share what we pay for in print, do we? Am I missing something here?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I think it's important to make a distinction between the e-reader (access) and borrowing a book at the library (ownership). I think that when borrowing a book it is still more along the lines of ownership rather than access. When borrowing the book from the library, you are still responsible for the object. While you may still be responsible for a kindle or a phone that has an application, the information contained on it doesn't really carry the same ownership as a book or object does. It's like you could think of borrowing a book at a library as being the "purchasing" of a book and the returning it placing it on your bookshelf. These are things you do when you own a book. It's impossible to place an ebook on the shelf--it stays in the memory. I don't know if much of this makes sense, but I can see the argument for borrowing library books being more on the ownership lines.
I can really empathize with what Emily Walshe is saying in her essay. I subscribe to Audible books and it irritates me no end that after having listened to a book I cannot pass it on to someone else. What happened to the right of first sale? I buy it and it's mine and can do with it what I like. That doesn't happen in the land of Audible or Kindle. A rebellion would be great!
Post a Comment