May 2, 2008
“Owning” vs. “licensing;” or, will e-bookworms gnaw our entrails?
Over at Crooked Timber, John Holbo has a post on some questions Kindle raises regarding “ownership.” First, he quotes from Kindle’s owner’s agreement:
You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.
And then . . .
I am annoyed to think that I might pay almost full price for a book that I don’t technically own. I’m just ‘licensing’.
At the same time, maybe this is a price point issue, rather than one of principle. If the eBooks are a lot cheaper, maybe it’s an acceptable trade-off. One thing that seems weird and probably temporary is that academic books available on Kindle cost almost as much as their dead tree counterparts.
Example: my department just hired the redoubtable Neil Sinhababu. Good for us! He has a new book on Nietzsche and Morality, co-edited with Brian Leiter. I’m curious to read it. But had I Kindle I sure wouldn’t be tempted to ‘license’ it for $56, as opposed to $60 for a brand new hardback copy, which doesn’t tempt me either. It would be such a boon to academic publishing if it were possible to break out of the absurd $20 for a glass of lemonade ‘I’ve only got to sell one’ Calvin profit model. The thought that the lunacy of that approach to sales could actually be exported to the Kindle is maddening. I don’t know whether to blame Amazon or Oxford UP. The latter, I suspect, in this case.
As I was reading this, I found myself thinking that, if pushed to a logical conclusion, the electronification of texts could return us to something like the medieval era: an actual loss (relatively speaking) of access to texts, should paper go the way of clay tablets and vellum–and woe betide those who share their access with the unlicensed-unwashed. Knowledge becomes the province of those with modems and the money/willingness to pay to temporarily own something.
Or am I missing something? What say you, Kindle owners?
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I’m hoping this will decrease over time. What happened with iTunes I think gives a good indication of what hopefully will happen with digital text. In order to get the old schoolers on board you give them all sorts of quacked digital authority. Once the new technology becomes legitimized in the eyes of the corporations who own the content then the DRM seems to loosen somewhat, and hopefully fall away.
Here’s to hoping.