<
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/06/29/enjoy-digital-ownership-and-public-libraries-while-you-still-can/>
"Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive,
spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of
Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible:
Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their
Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This will prevent anyone
from buying audio titles individually. However, Audible still sells
subscriptions through the app (…)
Karpeles points out that this is yet another straw in the wind indicating that
the ownership of digital goods is being replaced with a rental model. He wrote
a post last year exploring the broader implications, using Netflix as an
example:
What content landlords like Netflix are trying to do now is eliminate our
“purchase” option entirely. Without it, renting become the only option and
they are thus free to arbitrarily hike up rental fees , which we have to pay
over and over again without us getting any of these aforementioned rights
and freedoms. It’s a classic example of getting less for more.
He goes on to underline four extremely serious consequences of this shift. One
is the end of “forever access”. If the company adopting the rental model goes
out of business, customers lose access to everything they were paying for. With
the ownership of goods, even if the supplier goes bankrupt, you still have the
product they sold to you."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
