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Comment by chanux | Hacker News Reader

To add to the downsides you have mentioned, we practically don't really own them. I mean, almost.

I don't buy as many physical books as I used to; mostly fiction, and mostly used.

I buy a fair number of ebooks, mostly technical, and mostly from O'Reilly. I love that they're DRM-free; in my case I take the PDF version, but they have other formats.

Pakt has a very low-intrusiveness form of "DRM." They print your name on every page of the pdf that you buy, but it's otherwise unrestricted.

I don't think Pakt or O'Reilly is going to come after you for sharing an ebook with a family member, and I've given a few copies of O'Reilly books to colleagues, to evangelize both O'Reilly and the tech in question.

Similarly Springer ebooks have your name as a watermark at the bottom of the page, but no "real" DRM.

It's a pretty reasonable compromise.

This. I categorize fiction anyway as "volatile" so I'm not too concerned when the book goes out of my reach (as long as I can read it once). Oreilly, Packt and Pragmatic's books in digital forms have little downsides, and the considerable upside that ever growing pile of physical books is no longer a stress factor (however minor) in a relationship :)

I will not rent anything that can be copied losslessly. (Among other things, this is the major reason I don't have netflix.) And I consider anything that can be (legally) taken from me without my consent, or that I cannot legally reencode, to be rented.

"Buying" an ebook currently is effectively renting it. If/when that changes, if/when I can actually buy an ebook, I will start buying ebooks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

And now you know (one of the reasons) why I don't own property.

Yeah, "renting for life" doesn't bode well for passing a first edition ebook on to your children ;)

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