Books

You've probably already heard that today Amazon is pulling the right to download ebooks. This makes it abundantly clear what has always been true: people don't own digital media on web2, and that's a problem.

At Alexandria, we debuted ebook download today with our latest release, a collection of thrillers.

The idea of ownership is getting tired 
If I can pull it, read it, without having a downloaded copy, wouldn't even notice the difference.

This is the issue though, with more and more of our media existing ONLY in digital, we rely on corporations to decide what continues to exist and what continues to be accessible. So if consumers don't actually own the media, there's nothing to protect that media from disappearing completely. This YouTuber does a great job explaining why this is so dangerous, in small and larger ways:

Founder, CEO, and Muse of Tragedy of /alexandria

I totally get this, but lets take a look at what's attainable. Users/Consumers do not want the responsibility of managing these properties themselves.  We've always needed a pool we can rent from. we had physical libraries, blockbuster etc. so maybe the real problem is how this pool is managed and regulated. And for that we need corporations, so maybe we need stiffer negotiations, however I don't think consumers would ever truly rally around the idea to own all they consume.

Took a look at the video too (didn't dive deep) and it seems she talks more about sub models  vs outright buying (seems like a different argument). However, subscription models are a trickle-down effect that were always inevitable in the long run. In this day and edge as digital products expand, backend services that used to be overlooked are getting way more expensive. Take a digital book for example; everytime you buy one from outrightly, you do not reduce the cost of hosting the book, that cost continues to run overtime, and multiply that by the number of books they'd have to add everyday. Eventually they can no longer break even by how many times a new user buys a book so they need to seek recurring value from recurring users. I don't like subscription either (when I have to pay for them, especially when I do not get as much value) but it seemed kind of obvious in the long run.

This is the issue though, with more and more of our media existing ONLY in digital, we rely on corporations to decide what continues to exist and what continues to be accessible. So if consumers don't actually own the media, there's nothing to protect that media from disappearing completely. This YouTuber does a great job explaining why this is so dangerous, in small and larger ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqt7Ev37IbA&t=1s