Sellers of ebooks have final word

There’s a crass old joke about how you can never buy beer, just rent it. Who would think that the same joke applies to book buying in the digital age?

Many people unwrapping iPads and Amazon Kindles this week and loading them with bestsellers or classics will not have any idea how limited their rights are as their books’ ‘‘owners’’.

In fact, they will not be owners at all. They will be licensees. Unlike the owners of a physical tome, they won’t have the unlimited right to lend an ebook, give it away, resell it or leave it to their heirs. If it is bought for their iPad, they won’t be able to read it on their Kindle. And if Amazon or the other sellers don’t like what they have done with it, they can take it back, without warning.

All these restrictions ‘‘raise obvious questions about what ‘ownership’ is’’, observes Dan Gillmor, an expert on digital media at Arizona State University. ‘‘The companies that license stuff digitally have made it clear that you own nothing.’’

Typically, ebook buyers have no idea about these complexities. How could they? The rules and limitations are embodied in ‘‘terms of service’’ documents that Amazon, Apple and other sellers shroud in legalese and bury deep in their websites.

In the non-digital world, copyright ends with the first sale of each copyrighted object. Once you buy a book, it is yours to lend, give away, or resell. Copyright is safeguarded by the limitations of physical transfer – once the book is given or loaned, the original buyer no longer has access to it. If a library owns five copies of a book, only five borrowers can read it at the same time. Theoretically a book can be photocopied, but only at great effort and with a perceptible loss of quality.

In digitaldom, however, technology allows infinite copies to be made, with no loss of quality. Unrestricted transferability becomes a genuine threat to the livelihood of authors, artists, film-makers, musicians.

So some limitation is sensible. That is usually done through digital rights management, or DRM, which encodes copy or usage limitations into the digital file.

The question is whether the balance has tipped too far in favour of the booksellers, at consumers’ expense. The answer is yes.

For one thing, DRMhas put far too much power in the hands of digital booksellers. Amazon, in particular, has shown it cannot be trusted with that power. In 2009, having learnt that it inadvertently had sold unauthorised ebook versions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm through its website, the company simply deleted those ebooks from buyers’ Kindles stealthily, without warning.

Amazon settled a subsequent lawsuit by promising never to steal a book back from a Kindle without the device owner’s permission.

Moreover, nothing is permanent in the digital world. In libraries you can find volumes that date back hundreds of years and can still be read (if carefully); but there are digital files that date back only a decade yet are completely unintelligible today.

Nowhere does Amazon, Apple or any other distributor pledge to support its digital formats in perpetuity. Quite the contrary. They typically warn that they can cancel their service at any time, without warning, in a way that could end your access to a lifetime of ebook purchases in the flash of an electron. They could also go out of business, leaving millions of dependent customers in the lurch.

Amazon keeps your purchased content for free on its own servers – the term is ‘‘in the cloud’’ – for downloading to your Kindles as needed.

I cannot find any written promise by Amazon that this storage will always be free.

If it announces a few years from now that henceforth there will be a monthly fee to store books purchased, say, more than 10 years ago, what rights will you have to resist? None.

There are ways to protect your ebooks from grasping ebooksellers or the future. Programs available on the web can strip theDRMcode from your purchased items – for books, one possible method involves an elibrary management program called Calibre. The program easily can be augmented with a DRMstripping application so you can convert ebooks sold in any proprietary format into a different format or even as plain text.

But is it legal? No-one is quite sure, and that is a problem. The guiding principle must be that an ebook owner’s rights and responsibilities parallel those of a book owner, and the same must go for authors, publishers and booksellers. Clarify these rules of ebook commerce, and the power of electronic booksellers over publishers might be reduced, and consumers would know what they were buying – and would own what they bought.

Leave the rules vague, and the victims will be authors, consumers and publishers.