On Owning Books and Music

[Robert Mahnke]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a profound insight here.  If you "own" a copy of a Pynchon book, you certainly have the right to do all sorts of things with that paper, but those rights are limited.  E.g., you can't sell someone the rights to make a film from the copy of your book.  Because digital media work differently as a matter of technology, you don't have to have to "own" a copy of a book now to read it, but that was equally true a decade ago, when you could go to the public library and borrow a copy.  If people are really happy reading a text on a screen, the increased availability of books in digital form means they don't have to buy a bound copy of a new novel or even go to the library, but it's not clear to me that this changes everything.  I spend a lot of time in front of a computer reading all sorts of interesting things, but I don't want to read novels on a computer screen.  If other people do, that's great, but it's cheap enough to bind books that I suspect there will continue to be a robust market for them.


-----Original Message-----
>From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jan 23, 2009 11:43 AM
>To: Henry Musikar <scuffling at gmail.com>
>Cc: Pynchon Liste <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: On Owning Books and Music
>
>On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Henry Musikar <scuffling at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/2009/01/own-nothing.php#comments
>
>http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/01/better_than_own.php
>
>Now on behalf of the loyal opposition ...