Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet.
The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”
The situation brings to mind an interview I did over a decade ago, with the executive of a now-defunct streaming platform. He told me candidly that the goal of all this was to make digital media a “utility” like gas or electricity—a faucet that dispenses the world’s art as “content,” with tech companies in complete control of what goes in the tank and what comes out of it.
Hearing this was a real tin foil hat moment for me. For more than two decades, I’ve been what some might call a hoarder but what I’ve more affectionately dubbed a “digital packrat.” Which is to say I mostly avoid streaming services, I don’t trust any company or cloud with my digital media, and I store everything as files on devices that I physically control. My mp3 collection has been going strong since the Limewire days, I keep high-quality rips of all my movies on a local media server, and my preferred reading device holds a large collection of DRM-free ebooks and PDFs—everything from esoteric philosophy texts and scientific journals to scans of lesbian lifestyle magazines from the 1980s.
Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.
On a related note, if you are fortunate enough to have a public library where you live (like many of us in the US), avail yourself of their resources. They often offer a lot more than just books.
It’s perhaps not fully in the spirit of the author, since you don’t solely own that either, but in the US at least, they’re unique public institutions owned and run by local government, not state or federal. So in a sense, you own it insomuch as your community owns it and you continue to be a part of that community.
If we have to pay for access to something we then don’t own, we may as well do it as a collective. So public libraries. Librarians in my country and city are excellent curators and, information and topics on display are more interesting and less insulting than what a pyramid scheme’s algorithm thinks I should ‘buy’ next. They’re often topical, relevant to our local community and timely. Libraries and librarians have a vested interested in books being good for us, and the service being useful to individuals and community, which goes beyond physical books also as you say. Amazon is in a race to the bottom with total disdain and disregard for readers, authors and probably even the sellers.