An interesting perspective -- "You don't own your Kindle books, Amazon reminds customer":
On a dark and stormy night, an employee of your local bookstore strolls into your home, starts tossing books you'd purchased over the last few years into a box, and — despite your protest — takes them all away without saying a word.
Thankfully that's not what happened to Linn Jordet Nygaard. Well, not exactly. The Norwegian woman found herself on the wrong side of bureaucracy, but the outcome was much the same (without as much mud on the carpet): Amazon turned off her Kindle account, blocking her from her own books. And they wouldn't tell her why.
[. . .]
Nygaard's little dust-up with Amazon isn't, in and of itself, a big deal. But it serves as a bitter reminder that we don't ever truly own the digital goods and software we buy online. Instead, we rent them, or hold them in a sort of long-term lease, the terms of which are brokered and policed exclusively by the leaseholder.
Of course the same thing can be said of the movies we experience through the digital world. But we've only had a few years of experience in "owning" movies, compared with centuries of being able to have our own private libraries. I'm not sure how big a deal this is for me. I don't know that I ever really thought I owned books; I just collected copies of them. And the threat (pretty remote, I'd guess) of having my books yanked is somewhat offset by the convenience of having them on multiple platforms. In addition to my Kindle e-reader, I have the Kindle app on both my tablet and my smartphone. I never have to be anywhere without the extensive library that I carry around with me.
