Hm, though to argue against myself for a minute, it occurs to me that my unhappiness with e.g. Amazon Kindle books might be poetically summarized as "Kindle is like buying books from an airline's sales department." Non-refundable, non-tradable, locked to me.

So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my metaphorical socks.

Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline pricing, for example. Yikes.