You NEVER own anything that is "virtual." While I have an iPod and enjoy it tremendously, it hasn't replaced my CD or DVD collections. If I ever bought a Kindle, it would not replace all the books I have. Besides, you never own a book.
Well, fuck that.
Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.
Digital rights management (DRM), which Kindle uses to lock in its library, raises critical questions about the nature of property and identity in digital culture. Culture plays a large role – in some ways, larger than government – in shaping who we are as individuals in a society. The First Amendment protects our right to participate in the production of that culture. The widespread commodification of access is shaping nearly every aspect of modern citizenship. There are benefits, to be sure, but this transformation also poses a big-time threat to free expression and assembly.
I don't think print is "dying" at all, but I despise this tendency to digitalize everything and strip us of our right to own anything.
And the rich, of course, will still have books and other tangible items.
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