rikard.me/blog/009.txt                                Sat 06 Jan, 2024


                    Why ebooks are bad (imo, lmao)


I was reading 'Onda Själar' by Eino Hanski today.  The book itself is
a first edition copy that I inherited from my great grandfather.  He
bought and read it in 1981, as indicated by a note he left on the
title page.

For some reason it struck me that I was holding a book printed more
than forty years ago, and that replicating this with a digital book
would be impossible.

I have a Kindle with various books on it.  Those books are locked to
my Amazon account.  I can't lend or give them to someone when I'm done
reading them.  In forty years, no one can have those books.  I may
give away my Kindle, but at that point it will be ancient technology,
and who knows if it will even work still.

Ebooks is one of many things that are part of a growing trend of
non-ownership.  Instead of owning physical items, we rent services.
We 'buy' an ebook from Amazon and we're allowed to keep it as long as
Amazon lets us.

I bought my first Kindle in 2012, and I read a lot of books on it.
But for a few years I didn't touch it.  When I eventually did want to
use it again, I charged it, only to find out that I was locked out of
my account.  Amazon had disabled Wi-Fi for a range of old models that
were running an out-of-date operating system.  Since it had been lying
in my drawer uncharged for over a year, the required update never
installed.  The Kindle had books on it, but I was not even able to
access them in an offline mode.  It was unusable after just a few
years.

The oldest book on my shelf was printed in 1927.  It's almost a
hundred years old, and I can read it as easily today as I would have
then.  An e-reader will be obsolete in less than ten years, and will
likely be unusable in twenty (or much sooner if you don't actively use
it).

We see this so much in society today.  We don't own movies or music
anymore, we stream them through services that may arbitrarily restrict
our access to them.  We don't even own professional grade software
anymore, having now also become a subscription.

It's sad that we so happily trade freedom for apparent convenience.