No Sharing Allowed

[Commentary] As convenient as they are, I've long worried about the many ways in which e-book purveyors restrict readers' rights.

You can't resell the books you purchase for the Amazon Kindle, and you can't read them on most other e-readers. We also don't really own e-books in the same way we own paperbacks -- Amazon has gone as far as remotely deleting titles from users' devices.

Amazon's restrictions are misguided. They're bad for readers, they're bad for authors, they're bad for e-book stores, and they may even be bad for publishers. Of course, the ways in which our rights get chipped away as we move away from analog content is a constant worry in the digital age. I'm not the first pundit to note how terrible it is that we can no longer share, resell, or modify the books, movies, and video games that we get over the Internet. But the sharing restrictions that publishers have placed on e-books strike me as particularly stringent, a rule that underlines how we'll mourn physical media when it goes away. Under Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's sharing model, you're allowed to loan out a book just once, for two weeks, and while it's loaned out, you don't have access to it. The fact that publishers can't stomach even this milquetoast model should have us scared for a future in which physical media loses its primacy.