Unlike those books lining the shelves in your living room, the ownership of books in the amorphous digital realm is much less clearcut. As Michael Kozlowski points out in this article for Good E-Reader, “When Amazon sells you an eBook for the Kindle, they have the right to remove it at any time. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is referenced and Amazon can take your books away if it finds you’ve been naughty.”
It’s a cogent point and to anyone who has purchased dozens or maybe even hundreds of books on Amazon or any of the other online retailers, the thought that a click of radio button in the administration room of a distant server farm can instantly take away your entire library is a bit unsettling. Given the numbers of ebook stores that have gone belly up in recent years, the question of ownership rights cuts to the heart of the ebook revolution. And, as is often case, Digital Rights Management rears it’s ugly head, adding entanglements that make ownership problematic in certain situations.
There are only a few online bookstores of note that do not sell their books using Digital Rights Management (DRM) and allow for a somewhat clearer path of ownership. TOR books is a science fiction and fantasy imprint and they made the call to abandon DRM and sell books directly to customers. Pottermore came into existence as an avenue to use digital watermarks as a way to sell Harry Potter books, and not restrict how a user can read them. Self-publishing companies such as Smashwords leave it up to the author to decide if they want to employ DRM or not, but when you buy a Smashwords title from iBooks, it does have DRM. Theoretically, what would happen to your purchases if Smashwords went out of business?
The question raised is a good one: do we need consumer protection laws to prevent an ebook seller from blocking access to a purchased title—whether through legalistic fiat or business collapse?