Week 10: The Meaning of Ownership

I don't buy e-books very often. In fact, I think I've only ever bought two (the rest I have either borrowed or, um, obtained in other ways). One of these books was the most recent Outlander novel (I swear, I have decent taste in books, I just also...really like Scottish time traveling romance novels??). I just had to read it, and I couldn't find it in a library or in a bookstore. So I went on Amazon, and bought the e-book.

Of course, as Professor Galey has pointed out, Amazon made me download their Kindle reader for Mac. And then that meant that I had to remember what my Amazon account was, and whether I had updated my credit card on it from the last time I used it, etc etc. Then the book had to download, which took forever, and then when I opened it, some of the features (including family trees) were wonky; we've all discussed this song and dance of the e-book to death. Nevertheless, I read it, and then went back to re-read it.

The problem was when I went to buy my second ever e-book (...a book written by the authors of my favorite snarky fashion website, Go Fug Yourself, I know, I'm not doing my reputation any favors here) I totally forgot which Amazon account I had downloaded the first e-book from. On top of that, I somehow managed to download one as an actual e-book, and the other for use in the Kindle web interface. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the web interface book into the Kindle app, or the Kindle book into the web interface app.

Eventually, my computer went kaput and I had to get a new one. I have yet to download the Kindle reader app, probably because I haven't had the desire or time to read the 8th Outlander book (it's like 8 billion pages long.) I haven't logged into my Amazon account in a while to read the Go Fug Yourself book. So, it's almost as if I don't own these books anymore--I don't have access, which is just about as good as not actually having them. I'm sure legally I have the right to access some bits of code that translate into a book if I actually remembered my password, and the interface I was using, but it's not at all the same as being able to take a book, and then pop it in a suitcase and then move it to another house or another country. It's not like the format of the book will change--my novel won't suddenly morph into a picture book, for example. I'm not going to suddenly lose the ability to read, or  the ability to turn the pages of the book, or lose access by putting it on the wrong bookshelf that I can't reach.

The annoying part is, I'm probably going to have to re-download both books if I would like to read them, and really, if I'm going to be reading a book online at all, I'd rather read it in the iBooks app (I like things to be tidy.) Why does it have to be so complicated? I'm sure Amazon's web interface is there in the name of accessibility (so if you don't have the app, you can still reach the content, presumably), but it just made things worse for me.