My Point

This email from a NY Times readers says what I say: that I prefer the book because I have the book for a lifetime. It's there. I know where it is. Short of fire or theft, it isn't going anywhere. It will be there as long I wish for it to be there. What about ebook content? Will it be there 10 years from now, 20 years from now? I doubt it.

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Mod's claim that -- essentially -- print is dead, is similar to other claims along these lines, in that they purposely ignore a key ingredient in the equation: DRM. Books don't have it, but most digital media do.

If I buy a book, I can do what I want with it. I can share it with someone else. I can sell it. I can donate it to a library. I can store it away and re-read it, years later, knowing it will still work.

Digital media, on the other hand, generally can do none of those things. I cannot buy a Kindle book and share it with someone, or sell it, or donate it to a library. And I cannot be sure it will still be there if I put my Kindle away and decide to come back to it in 10 years; the Kindle may have died and not be replaceable, or the license may expire.

When people like Mod blather on about this topic, but refuse to take the straitjacket of DRM into account, they reveal their total ignorance of the topic at hand. It IS true, as they say, that content matters ... but because of that, something else also matters enormously, and that is ACCESS to the content. With DRM you have limited and/or tenuous access to what you've bought.

Thus, I say to Mr Mod and others of his type: Stop trying to delude everyone by ignoring the existence of DRM in digital media. The sooner you do that, the more credibility you will have.