I wouldn't be too quick to assume that the idea of owning
media is dead, or even threatened. What would kill it? The cost of printing and shipping? That is lower than ever. The cost of production and editing and marketing? Those need to be paid for ebooks too, and once you
have done that reformatting for print is a minor task.
And readers aren't going to be forced to abandon old media. They must be coaxed. If you want readers on iOS, or Kindle or anything else, you need to offer an experience that is better than print, and better than the open web. Because readers have many alternatives.
I agree that the current ebook model is rental, not sales. We will see how that plays out. My expectation is that the buying of print books will persist, alongside the ebook rental market, until the DRM comes off the ebooks. Lending books is an important use case. Borrowing library books is an important use case. Shifting media
from platform to platform is an
important use case.
I'm with you, which actually surprises me. Now that I own a very nice ebook reader in the iPad, I've bought a couple of ebooks, but it feels oddly like pulling teeth. I'm not excited about ebooks, unlike movies or music.
I have four reasons why I want to buy media rather than rent it:
I want to be able to consume it as I like. I don't want it to be tied to a device that I might sell or that might break. If I get a new device, I want to be able to move my media to it.
Convenience. I want to be sure that, when I need book X, I can get to it quickly.
Future proofing. I want confidence that the media I like won't get taken off the market and disappear into a black hole where it will never be seen again. This happens depressingly often in commercial publishing. Consider the dreadful fate of the version of Star Wars I saw as a kid.
Price. I don't want to have to pay hardcover price for everything. I'm kind of resigned to the fact that ebooks won't be much cheaper than normal books, but I do want them not to be significantly more expensive.
Music and movies have effectively solved most of these problems, basically because they either have no DRM or are easily rippable. Because it is easy to rip music, via the so-called "analog hole" if nothing else, I can always move it to another medium in an emergency. I can back up my music and video onto hard drives or web services. If I encounter a video or song on YouTube that I really like and am afraid is going to go away, I can back that up too. And it turns out that it's hard to stop video from circulating on the internet, so the risk of stuff going out of print and becoming completely unavailable has gotten much lower. Indeed, the ease of online distribution is flooding YouTube with more old video material than I ever knew existed.
In such a world, I'm increasingly happy to move to an all-rental model for most movies and music.
Books are different. They are really hard to rip from physical media: Scanning is a total pain in the ass. The rental ones have DRM. There is no lending of ebooks, and they can't be moved from reader to reader unless the vendors support it. And so, famously, there is no guarantee that the thing I paid money for won't just evaporate.
Which brings up another important criterion: It is hard to compete with the durability of the printed book, which is more archival than any digital data I own. Even my crappiest pulp paperbacks are likely to outlive every piece of digital media in my house. Contrast this with DVDs: They're not just physically frail, but the whole format isn't guaranteed to outlive me: What good are the disks if the players go the way of the Victrola, or even the eight-track player? That kind of makes it easier to sell me on rented DVDs: The alternative to a cheap rental is a dubiously durable personal copy. But alternative to ebooks is the codex book, a medium that routinely lasts hundreds of years, which I can read so long as I still have vision, and which is probably cheaper to buy. (Though not, alas, cheaper to store or move.)
And readers aren't going to be forced to abandon old media. They must be coaxed. If you want readers on iOS, or Kindle or anything else, you need to offer an experience that is better than print, and better than the open web. Because readers have many alternatives.
I agree that the current ebook model is rental, not sales. We will see how that plays out. My expectation is that the buying of print books will persist, alongside the ebook rental market, until the DRM comes off the ebooks. Lending books is an important use case. Borrowing library books is an important use case. Shifting media from platform to platform is an important use case.