Sell This Book! | The Nation

Maybe you've noticed how things keep disappearing-or stop working-when you "buy" them online from big platforms like Netflix and Amazon, Microsoft and Apple. You can watch their movies and use their software and read their books-but only until they decide to pull the plug. You don't actually own these things-you can only rent them. But the titanic amount of cultural information available at any given moment makes it very easy to let that detail slide. We just move on to the next thing, and the next, without realizing that we don't-and, increasingly, can't-own our media for keeps.