Amazon’s ebook license a scam, says Doctorow
The very cool new blog at Mediabistro.com, eBookNewser, points us to an interesting piece by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about buying ebooks from Amazon. Says Doctorow,
When Amazon “sells” you a Kindle ebook, they don’t really sell it to you. If you read the fine-print, you’ll see that they’re waving their hands furiously and declaring that you aren’t “buying” the book, but rather “taking a license to a limited set of uses” for the book. Whereas a book that you buy comes with all kinds of rights, such as the right to sell or give the book away (Jeff Bezos: “[W]hen someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.“) a book that you license from Amazon comes with a very small subset of those rights, as defined by a lengthy and difficult-to-grasp “license agreement.”
Except, says Doctorow, “most of us know that this is a scam… It’s such a silly notion that even Amazon can’t keep its story straight. Take this press-release in which Amazon trumpets that its ‘customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books.’ Purchased, not ‘licensed.’”
In short, “It’s a rip-off, pure and simple,” says Doctorow. “I won’t buy any of Amazon’s digital offerings until they clean up their act and deliver the same customer rights to e-goods buyers as they do to hard-goods buyers.”
I entirely agree. I can’t see why, once one has bought a Kindle, one shouldn’t also be purchasing - not renting - the books downloaded. There could be an option to rent - like dvds, computer games, music cds, movies - but not a no-alternative obligation. There are books on my bookshelves which I read years ago but keep so that I have the choice of reading them again. Or lending them to friends. I’d be appalled to go for one on the shelf only to find it been ‘recalled’. And sometimes I buy a book but don’t actually get around to reading it for a year or more. With Kindle and Amazon it would have gone! Same as you, I don’t intend to buy a Kindle in order to ‘rent’ books.
Even a hardback book purchased at a bookstore is not purchased. Instead, it is licensed. The key difference: the licensing that accompanies a physical book purchase is far less restrictive.
When you buy a physical book, you own the binding, the cover, the paper. You own none of the intellectual contact inside. You own the ink, but you don’t own the ideas that the ink represents.
To say that Amazon’s buyers “purchased” a lot of ebooks isn’t incorrect, insofar as it isn’t incorrect to say I “purchased” a book in a bookstore. It’s simply how the english language has evolved. Much more precise, much more correct, and far less consumer friendly, would be to say “I just purchased a license to read the latest best seller novel, and they gave me a hardback book to go along with it.”
I sympathize with Doctorow. We need some very bright people to figure out how to implement the appropriate technology so that all of the licensing advantages that come with buying a physical book are mirrored when purchasing an ebook — as long as piracy can be significantly curbed rather than exploited.