I’ve written before about ebooks vs physical books. The conclusion I’ve always come to is that while I prefer physical books, the convenience of ebooks makes them better.
But regardless of if they are better or worse for individuals, are they better for society? Let’s explore!
So like I said: ebooks are convenient, or at least they feel convenient. They are delivered instantly, their text is very easily searchable, they sync across devices. On the surface, they look like the next natural step after paper: same idea, just upgraded. We can easily imagine the next generation of e-reader which is so thin as to resemble a sheet of paper but with even better clarity that current e-ink screens.
Except they aren’t the same thing at all, even if we keep shrinking technology to make them look almost the same.
The key here is that we aren’t shifting from physical books to digital books. We are shifting from ownership to license. When ebooks became a thing, publishers didn’t just change the format, they changed the entire power structure around reading.
This distinction usually gets dismissed as pedantry. “Whatever. I have the file — I can read it.” And for individuals, this is mostly true, especially if you know how to strip DRM, convert formats, and store your own backups, as most of you reading this probably know. And even if you don’t know, Calibre, the open source and free book app, can do it for you. You can preserve your personal library if you’re proactive enough. Individually, ebooks can be a huge boon. We can all have personal libraries to rival the greatest physical library. When VR becomes cheaper in a dozen years, we will be able to make these personal libraries look and feel amazing.
But individuals are not the point. Let’s worry about the group — about society.
The real danger shows up when you zoom out to institutions that rely on stable ownership across decades: public libraries, university libraries, archival collections, researchers, historians. The people who form civilization’s long-term memory.
They cannot jailbreak an OverDrive lease or “liberate” a Kindle file. I mean they can, but legally they can’t, and they are large enough that laws are far more binding for them than for us. They cannot violate the licensing terms forced on them by publishers, terms that increasingly resemble rental agreements, not purchases.
I have been motivated to write this piece after watching Jeffrey Edmunds’ excellent TED Talk on the matter. In it, he explains this crisply. Libraries used to own books. They bought a copy, placed it on a shelf, and kept it until it fell apart. Once purchased, no publisher could repossess it or revoke access because of a political shift, a change in licensing policy, or a dispute over rights.
Digital books break this.
The Financial Trap
If a library buys a hardcover, one payment is enough for decades of use. Even longer, if they employ someone who knows how to restore books, which they almost certainly do.
If a library “acquires” an ebook, however, they pay for:
- expiring licenses
- per-circulation fees
- platform access fees
- metered usage models
- sometimes all of the above
A library can pay more for one ebook license than for a dozen physical copies. Yet after the license expires, they have nothing to show for it. No archive copy. No right to preserve it. No ownership.
A public library might pay $60 for a two-year license of a title that costs $14.99 on Kindle. And after those two years? The book evaporates. Pay again.
This is not a sustainable model. It is an extraction scheme.
The Control Problem
The financial side is bad enough, but the deeper issue is control over the historical record. In the print era, once a book was published and acquired by libraries, it effectively entered the cultural bloodstream. Even if publishers regretted the text or wanted it revised, libraries held the older editions. Digital licensing ends that.
Publishers and rights-holders can now remove titles from platforms, modify them silently, or refuse to renew a library’s license. And libraries have no recourse, because they never purchased anything to begin with.
Readers often joke about Amazon deleting books from Kindles — something that has happened at least once in a very Orwellian way for copies of, ironically, 1984 — but for libraries, this is not hypothetical. If a publisher pulls a title, it is simply gone. The library can’t preserve it, can’t keep a backup, can’t provide access for future generations. And this isn’t just hypothetical worry; as Edmunds talks about in that video, this actually happens thousands of times a year.
We have built a system where companies can erase knowledge.
Academic Libraries Are Even More Vulnerable
University libraries face an even sharper blade. Academic ebooks and journal packages are often locked behind eye-watering subscription fees. When budgets tightened in the late 2010s, many universities discovered an uncomfortable truth: if they cancelled a subscription, decades of accumulated digital journals disappeared overnight.
A physical archive is permanent. A digital archive is as ephemeral as the wind.
Some universities try to get around this. I’ve read about some universities resorting to bizarre workarounds like printing PDFs or storing unofficial “dark archives” to preserve access, because the official licensing model gives them no right to their own historical research materials.
This is even more comical when you consider that many of these books and papers universities try to back up in this way were produced by the universities themselves, at university (and student) cost, but were taken control of by publishers and licensed back.
It’s impossible to overstate how dangerous this is for scholarship. Imagine a future historian researching today’s political climate only to discover that huge parts of the written record vanished because a publisher decided a licensing change was “strategically necessary.”
Where We Stand Now
As individuals, we can insulate ourselves. Even if the ease of digital wins over physical for us, we can strip out DRM and maintain local digital backups. But that’s not a solution for society.
The system we have now means:
- libraries preserve nothing
- publishers control everything
- access becomes a revenue stream, not a public good
- the cultural record becomes brittle and censorable
You don’t need a dystopian imagination to see where that leads. All it takes is a licensing change, a corporate buyout, or a shift in political pressure.
The danger isn’t that you might lose access to your Kindle library. The danger is that the next generation might lose access to ours.
Man.. that’s depressing. Here is that TED Talk again, if you want to follow me down the same thought path that led to this article.
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
I appreciate the convenience of ebooks but I won't buy them. Usually, I read physical books and in most cases i prefer to read them that way. On occasion i have downloaded eBooks to read from let's say non-official sources. Generally, I already own a physical copy.
Thanks for sharing the TED talk. Your post reminds me of three more different versions of copyright law: right to copy, copy it right away, and copy it right. 😂🤣
Already watched the TED Talk. I am glad to know about Glossa and the https://libraries.psu.edu/. I am now downloading a file about digital assets. Thanks!