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People keep showing me ebook readers that try to recreate the book experience with cute animations showing the turning of pages. But if you want to recreate the important part of the book experience, the part that keeps people buying books for their whole lives, filling their homes with treasured friends that they would not part with for love nor money, then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books.
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I think Doctorow misses the point of what is the important part of the experience. He was fine until he wrote
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then we need to restore and safeguard ownership of books.
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If you really want "to recreate the important part of the book experience ," then what you want to do is separate the poor writing from the great writing and encourage people to read. Although ownership is important, I see nothing great about owning junk writing and could care less whether I licensed it temporarily or owned it.
In my estimation, the keys to advancing ebooks are low price and no DRM (or a very portable social DRM). These two things will encourage readership, especially of unknown authors. I am willing to gamble a few dollars to discover whether an author is worth reading; I am even willing to have the work DRMed if the price is low enough, say no more than $2.
OTOH, I am not willing to pay $10+ for any work of fiction in ebook form because regardless of whether it has DRM or not, it has no inherent value except for the value it has to me to read it the first time, assuming the writing is topnotch, and even then it has no market value because it is so easily duplicated (where's the market for first edition ebooks?).
ebooks are easier to store and convenient to carry, but they have no secondary market, unlike pbooks. Absent the secondary market, it almost makes no difference whether they are DRMed or not, with the exception of those few books you may reread. Of the thousands of fiction books I have read in my life, there aren't more than a dozen or so that I have reread or thought about rereading.
Consequently, I think Doctorow gives too much emphasis to the importance of ownership and too little to the importance of writing quality.