As to rights, etc., most ebooks have an explanation that the book was leased and what you can and can’t do to it. Most people ignore it the same way they look past the FBI notice on a movie. Places like Amazon do a poor job of displaying this information on their sites, but they do have it for those who pay attention.

When you buy a physical book your rights to that particular copy cannot be abridged or modified by the publisher or the book seller because the only “contract” is the one implicit in all retail sales. The doctrine of first sale applies. When you buy (their term) an eBook from Amazon, you enter into a contract where you waive any claims to a proprietary interest in that particular copy. Other eBook sellers are free to offer different, more liberal, terms (e.g. O’Reilly).

The problem here is the dishonesty inherent in using terms such as “buy” when “lease” is closer to the truth. The obfuscation of contractual terms with click-through license notices that may change from one sale to another simply compounds the deception. Sellers who want you to believe that you own a copy of an eBook in the same ways that you can own a physical book are engaged in deception and need to be regulated. Like the warnings we see on other products, eBooks need to contain a clear, human-readable statement as to what it is that you have actually purchased. I would wager that a large proportion of eBook buyers today do not have a clear understanding of what they have actually purchased. If they did, we might see eBook sellers competing with one another with respect to the terms of their lease and that would be a good thing IMHO.

For links to the various government and legal documents that explain this, go here:

http://mbyerly.blogspot.com/2009/04/first-sale-doctrine-and-ebooks.html

I totally agree that libraries should be able to retain the lease in whatever format they can use, but it is a lease, not ownership.

* The author’s copyright bestows ownership of the content of a book in whatever form it is expressed, including the non-physical. That ‘copyright’ gives the author the right to sell copies directly or through others and also to sell other rights such as those for movies.

* The book purchaser has bought the rights to a single copy of that content. That’s why individuals or libraries get angry if they can’t move their single-copy digital content to a different platform. That’s like saying that, when you move, you can’t take that physical copy with you. It has to stay on that same shelf in your old apartment.

It’s also why the more ‘with it’ publishers such as:

http://oreilly.com

give you an account with them that lets you download, whenever you want, versions of that digital copy you own in the standard ebook formats. I’ve bought four books from them, and I just checked my members page. All are available for download as ePub, Mobi, and PDF, and two also have a format called Daisy. Here is how they express their policy:

“You get lifetime access to ebooks you purchase through oreilly.com. Whenever possible we provide them to you in five DRM-free file formats — PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, DAISY, and Android .apk — that you can use on the devices of your choice. Our ebooks are enhanced with color images, even when the print version is black and white. They are fully searchable, and you can cut-and-paste and print them. We also alert you when we’ve updated your ebooks with corrections and additions. Now includes Dropbox Sync!”

It’s a measure of just how clueless the major publishers are that they’re not doing something similar. Among other things, it’d give them a highly useful, Amazon-like awareness of who their readers are and what sort of books they like.

Apple, at least, seems to be moving that direction. Like O’Reilly, when you buy an ebook from them, you get the revisions free. And both Amazon and Apple let you keep a copy with them, sparing you the hassle of making sure that digital copy doesn’t get lost when you get a new computer or tablet.

To some extent, this warped ‘you don’t own it’ model flows from the software world, where some companies claim that those who buy their products merely have a license to use it. The better ones (i.e. Adobe) let you transfer that license or even move it from the Windows version to the Mac version. Others don’t.

But for software, that seeming limitation mattered less because new versions come out every year or two devaluing the old. License or ownership, buyers were happy to get the latest version, usually at a discount. The same isn’t true of ebooks. Those who buy ebooks want to be able to read or loan them many years in the future.

People really need to get over the belief they own the contents of a book. They own the paper, ink, and binding when they buy a physical book, they don’t own the contents. Without the paper, ink, and binding, they own nothing of a digital book because it is the content.