Why would I want to "own" my e-books?

[kilohertz53]

It's good to have choices. Borders+Sony, Amazon+Kindle, B&N+SomeOtherDevice -- maybe e-books really are poised to go mainstream. I hope the partnerships succeed and sell millions of e-books. They just won't be selling them to me.

The sort of books that I BUY are the kind that don't lend themselves well to e-reading, especially on small screens. I mostly buy reference books: dictionaries, atlases, art and photography books, gardening, DIY projects, and so on. Popular fiction and narrative non-fiction books work best on e-reading devices, but most of them are only worth reading once. They're entertainment. I don't want to own them, I just want to rent them.

A workable subscription model already exists for e-audiobooks. NetLibrary and OverDrive are services that many people can access through their public library systems. They provide instant access to thousands of popular audiobook titles. Download the windows media file and the license and the audiobook is yours for a few weeks until the license expires. Your tax dollars subsidize the system. It's not perfect. The protected .wma files are not compatible with Macs, iPods, or linux. Your audio player has to be able to handle subcription service content (a.k.a, "Plays for Sure"). C'est la vie. If I was offered a similar e-book service, either through my library or as a reasonably-priced individual subscription service, I'd sign up in a heartbeat and buy a portable e-reading device to suit the format of the offered e-books. Until then, I'll read today's best sellers on paper from the public library and public domain and CC on my Sony Reader.

[Nate the great]

Two things:

One: Why would you pay for something that you already get at the public library?

Two: Right now, owning an ebook costs the same as renting one.

[jasonkchapman]

Originally Posted by kilohertz53

The sort of books that I BUY are the kind that don't lend themselves well to e-reading, especially on small screens. I mostly buy reference books: dictionaries, atlases, art and photography books, gardening, DIY projects, and so on. Popular fiction and narrative non-fiction books work best on e-reading devices, but most of them are only worth reading once. They're entertainment. I don't want to own them, I just want to rent them.

You seem to have answered the question you posed in the title. You wouldn't want to. The very concept of a reference book doesn't lend itself well to paper books anyway. Too many of them are outdated too quickly. That's basically why the Web was invented, and reference material was the first to move from books to Web sites.

Fiction is a different concept, though. Personally, I don't read a lot of popular fiction, and the e-book list available through the library system is seriously anemic. As to owning entertainment on media, what do I know. Between LaserDisc and DVD, I have about 300 movies. They're entertainment, and I've watched all of them more than once (some of them dozens of times).

But my tastes and interests are not yours. Neither are your tastes mine. That's what makes the world go 'round.