It is true that there are plenty of downsides the Kindle books, mostly having to do with access and portability, but we must remember that digital books are not taking away our ability to lend our books to our friends or pass along our libraries to our children – it’s that they never granted us those abilities in the first place.

The Kindle: Not a Book, but a Massive Portable Library (via pith)

JCN on books vs. kindles. Especially interesting to me because he is less strictly a book person and more of a content-and-society person. I’m looking forward to his SXSW talk “Shoebox Full of Photos” about digital storage and memories.

(via rachelfershleiser)

My problem with this is that the ownership of a physical book/item gives libraries the legal right to loan and to share information from the items, while a Kindle simply grants one rights to use the item - not ownership rights.

(via jasonwdean)

The difference between licensing content for use vs purchasing an object and having the right to then do what you will with that object (including its content) is a very important one, and one that I tried to leave out of the argument completely. In the scenario I’m envisioning, Amazon and a public library are in the same effective position of being in possession of content that they can loan to their “customers,” which is why I positioned amazon as a private, for-pay library. It’s certainly NOT a public library, and I think to try to bundle them together would be incredibly dangerous.