The only reason I would want to sell most books anyway is to free up room in my apartment. But my hard drive is a lot tinier than my apartment and has a lot more space in it for books.

Technology goes obsolete all the time. 8-Track, bata, VHS, laserdisc, HD-DVD, software on floppy drives, or programs of discontinued operating systems. But everyone who bought that stuff still “owns” that stuff even though it can’t be used much anymore. Why is digital media so different?

What are the good arguments to give the ebook providers that they should sell them without restrictions? Even a real book is restricted by the fact the psychical product can’t be duplicated. Sure, I’d like to see all my ebook purchases DRM free too, but saying people can’t “own” something with DRM is a false analogy.

Writers, being readers themselves, also want to own books. But they suffer a slight conflict of interest as the promise (perhaps illusory) of DRM offers them hopes of lifetime revenues.

Publishers don’t suffer the writer’s conflict of interest. Traditional book publishers come from a background where they sold their books to readers who bought and subsequently owned them. But movie and music publishers, radio networks, television networks, come from a rentals background: every time a piece of ‘intellectual property’ of theirs is seen or heard, they got a bit of cash. This is their holy grail, to return to this model forever.

Many book publishers are now owned by larger corporations whose balance sheets are dominated by movie, music, and broadcast sub-entities. These larger corporations — combined with hard economic times that have been crushing the old blood of traditional publishing for decades now — are winning book publishers over to the endless rentals dream.

The library in the cloud! Subscribe and pay each time you read! Readers own nothing, possess nothing — every text is streamed!

Think about every school having to pay, every semester, per-student rentals on Hemingway, Salinger, all the 20th century classics. No more dog-eared copies passed down from hand to hand. Every copy clean and crisp and digitally pure, with ‘extras’ like notes that pop up, comments, annotations!

And a never-ending money stream to the publishers that provides them with financial security, a solid base of revenues upon which to build.

It is indeed a seductive and tantalizing prospect for the publishers.

I’m a book publisher in Brazil. Our website, editoraplus.org, publishes only new e-books, at no cost for authors or readers – we have one book written in english, but the others are all portuguese ones. We distribute under Creative Commons (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works)

About David’s post: any technology that restricts what I can do with with a book (or music, image, video, etc), restricts also my ownership rights. I can accept this situation if I get, previously, the chance to choose. Offer the possibility to pay less for it; but if I want to own the content and be free to carry it wherever I go – from e-book reader to PC to iPhone to paper without restrictions of any kind, why not offering me the chance to pay more (a little more) for that? I agree with David, I want to own (do whatever I want) with the books, want to call them “mine” books. And would happily pay for that, if the price and costs were fair.

It’s a shame that companys ignore that we, customers, love to choose for ourselves.