The Future of the (Owned) Book

I discovered an interesting example related to the issue of digital ownership in this post about e-book ownership from Meghan Neal, a contributing editor for the online magazine Motherboard. Neal discusses an example of a Georgetown professor travelling to Singapore who noticed that as he crossed the border, the Google Play app on his iPad immediately deleted his entire collection of 30-40 e-books.1  While I'm not overly invested in my e-book collection, I am certainly very attached to my print book collection. How would I feel if it was suddenly wiped out? And how does the concept of ownership change so drastically based on the differing form of these collections?

I kept these questions in mind as I read through course readings, but eventually I found myself on a tangential foray into resources related to the fields of marketing and economics. In particular, Watkins et al.'s 2016 article in The Journal of Marketing Management presents a fascinating discussion of the relationship between possession and ownership in the context of what the authors term 'digital virtual goods' (DVGs).2 It is suggested that possession implies a subjective, meaningful attachment to an object, while ownership refers to "a legally and/or socially sanctioned arrangement between people with respect to a thing and other people, where the 'thing' in question may include land, material objects or even ideas."3 This makes a sort of intuitive sense to me in that I consider my books to be treasured possessions while my home and car are objects over which I exercise ownership. However, Watkins et al. point out that increasingly, consumers are forming this same sort of meaningful bond with DVGs, illustrated by an example of a woman who lovingly refers to her World of Warcraft avatar as her "baby".4

How do DVGs lend themselves to the idea of possession and subjective attachment? My print collection is very much my own; barring some sort of catastrophic event or a thief of literary fiction, I'm secure in the knowledge that my books are tucked away where they belong. This is not the case with e-books, or my carefully curated iTunes collection, or the aforementioned avatar. Ownership over these goods is largely defined by their providers. Joshua Gans, in his 2012 e-book entitled Information Wants to be Shared, points out that information distribution relies on a medium and that consumers are never really paying for content but rather for the repackaging and delivery of content by information providers.5 In the case of DVGs, the medium has in many cases become proprietary; retailers are charging consumers for the technology and infrastructure underlying delivery rather than for the product itself. This is likely related to some degree to the fact that DVGs do not exhibit the same entanglement of form and content that is characteristic of print books and allows for simplicity in ownership. Instead, retailers are free to enforce digital rights management (DRM) over content, creating proprietary platforms, devices and formats that enforce consumer loyalty through restricting practices such as sharing, lending, or transferring goods among other people or devices. This move to access-based consumption of digital goods is a key theme of Watkins et al.'s discussion and parallels Rowberry's point that "the coming of the e-book marked a move away from selling books to offering services around the book."6

These restrictions on the culture of sharing and lending that is so conducive to print material brings about another fascinating aspect of this discussion; that is, the idea that objects have a "social life" or "biography" in which they have been re-introduced to the marketplace through secondhand outlets, passed on as heirlooms, or simply shared among friends and family.7 This culture of sharing and lending is very much ingrained in my life and community. Like others, I strive to minimize accumulation of unnecessary goods, opting instead to make use of rental agencies, lending programs, and sharing among friends and family to enact purposeful, short-term usability of goods. The nature of print books and their existence as social objects8 meshes well with this culture. However, given the complex nature of digital ownership in light of DRM, these practices of sharing are very much curtailed with respect to digital products. Thus, not only does DRM restrict ownership of DVGs, it also inadvertently inhibits possession and limits the social lives of objects.

My brief foray into these issues has left me with many more questions than I had to begin with. For example, will the move to access-based consumption and service infrastructure serve to eliminate the culture of sharing? Will DRM gradually erode the social lives of objects to the point that our treasured possessions are reduced to collections of intangible, vaporous goods? Does it matter? Are we forming attachments to virtual objects, the inevitable loss of which will one day cause us grief? Or is this embrace of impermanence a positive thing? Call me naive, but I believe the history of owned books is precisely what will protect their future. As social objects and treasured possessions, the very nature of books has and will continue to foster a culture of sharing. Yes, there is certainly a shift towards access-based consumption and a post-ownership economy; but thus far, the owned book has remained an irreplaceable possession in the lives of many.

1. Neal, Meghan. “Do You Ever Own Your E-Books?” Motherboard (2013).  http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/do-you-ever-own-your-e-books

2. Watkins, Rebecca D., Janice Denegri-Knott and Mike Molesworth. The relationship between ownership and possession: observations from the context of digital virtual goods. Journal of Marketing Management 23(2016): 44-70.

3. Watkins, Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 46

4. Watkins, Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 48

5. Gans, Joshua. "Information Wants to be Shared." Harvard Business Review (2012).

6. Rowberry, Simon P. “Ebookness,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2015): 1-18.

7. Watkins, Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 46

8. Thompson, John B. The Digital Revolution. In Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.