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Comment by monkeywork | Hacker News Reader

Rent is a poor term, instead you purchased a license to the content. Many ppl assume they purchased the content.

If it can be modified without your consent,. If it can be pulled from your devices without your consent,. Etc then you don't own those books.

If Amazon nukes your account on you do you still think you own those books?

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I’ve bought and read thousands - I don’t often reread them. Maybe a couple dozen I’ve reread in the last 25 years. So the convenience more than makes up for the lack of ownership.

That's not really relevant to the point being made: you've decided that the trade off is worth it for you, and that's truly fine. But I would wager that most people think that they "own" their Kindle purchases in the same way that they'd own a physical book they'd bought.

Some people do read books more than once. There are a few books I enjoy enough that I've read them quite a few times over the past 25 years or so. I've lost, sold, or given away the physical copies of nearly all of them, and have replaced them with ebooks. I would be very upset if those ebooks just disappeared someday.

(I don't have to worry, as I've de-DRMed and backed up all the books I've purchased. But I don't expect most Kindle owners to know how to do that, or even know that they need to do that to be safe.)

Well, I don't know about "own", but I will definitely still possess the ripped and de-DRMed copy that I always make as a matter of course.

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