Microsoft Support Phone numbershutting down its ebooks and Apple retiring iTunes is stark reminder of digital ownership
Microsoft Support Phone numbershuttering its
ebook store is hardly the end of the world. The
Kindle customer base is, by all accounts, predominant in this space. Not all
product launches succeed — some fail. That’s business.
And, to be fair in disclosing the “other side,” Microsoft Support Phone numberis offering coupons to make up
some of the lost value their ebook customers are experiencing.
But it gives one pause — and
should give one pause. Combined with the news that Apple is retiring the iTunes brand, these
developments could result in consumers who purchased content having it
completely wiped from their devices without notice.
Sherman, set
the WABAC machine for 1967
I’m one of those boomer kids
who acquired the book-buying habit young. I started buying a few books, either
on the ‘cheap table’ at the Woolworth’s (the original retail chain of “five and
dime” stores) or from such used books outlets I could find. Many of those cheap
little texts, I still have.
But let’s back up further into
history. Why are there used bookstores in the first place? Essentially, there
are used bookstores because a) the codex form of the book (that is, the
cardboard-and-paper binding of many pages) is durable and can be passed
from hand to hand, and b) an early Supreme Court decision (Bobbs-Merrill Co. v.
Straus, 1908) held that the trade in used books is legitimate.
In other words, under the First Sale Doctrine of
copyright law, once you buy any medium containing a copyrighted work (whether
book or DVD or physical photograph), the medium is yours to keep, sell, or even
destroy (you monster!), even though, under First Sale, you are
not permitted to make additional copies of what is recorded on the medium.
That is, although books contain
intangible intellectual property, the copyright protected work of which the
copy of the book is but a single instance, the physical copy you hold in your
hand of the book – the paper, the ink and the binding — is treated as a
trade good. It is a vendible item of chattel like a candy bar or a hat.
And, most important for purposes of our discussion, it was made to be read at
any time, without access to any server, and, like an emancipated child, it
bears no further relation to the press where it was printed.
The point of this ancient
history is to establish a context. In that context, books are seen as cultural
artifacts which we purchase, hold on to and, yes, read (sometimes).
In our time, though, digital is
indeed proving to be different. Ebooks, as it turns out, aren’t treated the
same, in either technology or law, as paper books are. Functionally,
legally, and (most importantly) culturally, they aren’t treated
equivalently to traditional hardbound books at all. Maybe, even here in the 21st century,
and as Nick Douglas suggests at the blog Lifehacker, “You should own your
favorite books in hard copy.”
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