When one buys a book, what does he or she own?It should be fair to state that there is an implicit agreement between the seller and the purchaser that one owns the right to read that book. Assuming this, it can be posited: One is within his or her rights to obtain a digital transcript of a book that he or she owns physically.
The intellectual vs the physical
There is a pragmatic human understanding of intellectual property that has been sidestepped and circumvented by those who skim off the top during transactions: Information can and always has been reproduced at exactly zero cost. Information is a fundamental right of existence. We would not have history if not for reproduction of information.
What has worth is steel and concrete. What has worth is gas and food. Physical items have inherent value. The system whereby intellectual property rights are owned and licensed is fundamentally flawed even in its own metaphors. By any philosophical standards intellectual property does not exist, it is not tangible.
Channels for distribution exist. It is the costs associated with the creation of physical media and the operation of these channels that have justified the costs for intellectual property, not the intellectual property's inherent value. The cost of reading and writing digital information is negligible and negate the current model.
Getting Rid of Books Altogether
Some like books and paper; I'm not advocating a mandatory book trade-in. However, what I'd like to stop is wholesale fleecing of consumers of information who do not know how to articulate this argument.
I'd like to buy a Kindle. But I'd like to buy a Kindle and access the hundreds of books I have sitting on my shelves already. Most of them have been digitized. Some of them are getting on in age and I'd like to be able to preserve them as they are no longer in print. But currently, I'd have to re-purchase them. This just doesn't make any sense, I own these stories. I have read these stories, and what I purchased are these stories, not a stack of inked paper bound at one edge.
A fundamental problem is, as Amazon recently demonstrated with its redacted 1984 debacle, even if one buys a book in the Kindle store, one doesn't "own" it. Amazon has the right to redact information.
Amazon isn't the only ebook provider, but they're setting precedents. And these are more dangerous than the DRM precedents set before for entertainment, music and movies. These are truly heinous capabilities. The ones by which, if used improperly, could remove volumes of shared human knowledge from record.
Even the mighty Google's own book project has been neutered. Instead of creating a free and open library of information, books' previews are displayed, whoring links to sellers like Amazon.
Whose responsibility is it to step up and demand that for the good of humanity, information be freely available?
Proposal
The future of paper publishing is extinction, but there are plenty of places in the world where my physical library would do some good.
- I'd like to be able to trade in my physical library for the acknowledgement that I have the right to each story and or set of information, whatever its digital incarnation.
- I'd like to prevent the waste of more resources printing physical media that should be recycled by finding a good home to those traded in assets.
I have not heard this argument publicised, and that frightens me a bit. Our lives are short, and this deliberate slowing of progress keeps us from seeing the future.
