Last night, after I finished the book I was reading (Mélusine, by Katherina Addison, the first in a series I’ll be writing about once I’ve finished them all), I went to open the next one in my NOOK app on my tablet and discovered the entire thing was blank. It said there were a bunch of pages in the book, but no matter how many times I swiped forward, I could never make it to page 2 or get any kind of anything to appear on the page. It was frustrating since it wasn’t time to get ready for bed yet but it was too late to really start anything new. Plus, you know, I’d bought an ebook that had turned out to be entirely useless to me. Nothing I did could fix the file (or the file of the 4th book in the series, which was bugged in the same way), so I found the support line, spent forty slow minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem with someone on their online helpdesk (which, to give this person their due, was available at eleven at night, central time, and seemed to be fairly competent at their job) only to eventually be given a refund since nothing they did seemed to resolve the problem for me. It was annoying and, sure, I got my money back, but I didn’t want money. I wanted to read the book!
Now, the day after this debacle, I’m trying to figure out where to get this book instead. After all, it would be foolish to buy it from Barnes and Noble again and expect things to work out better this time around. I could go to Amazon, but that wouldn’t feel great since I’ve managed to avoid buying a book from Amazon for over five years now and they’ve kind of screwed the book market over so I’d like to keep that streak going if at all possible. Plus, I would also probably run into my digital imperminance issues if I had to remind myself of two different ebook apps since I have a difficult enough time just remembering the one I actually use with some frequency. Buying these books physically seems impossible since I couldn’t find any place that listed anything but a digital copy during my brief foray into where I could even get a copy of the books I wanted other than Barnes and Noble (apparently, they were originally published in the early aughts and are only just now getting the ebook treatment). Digital seems to be the only option for me and while I’m open to the idea of moving to a more reliable platform or app (I mean, how the hell did I get blank/bugged copies of these books???), I’d hate to leave behind the books that I have already owned and read on my NOOK account. Sure, some of them are DRM free, but not all of them are. I doubt I’d be able to easily transfer them to even a third party app that doesn’t sell books, just allows you to read them.
Digital ownership can be incredibly frustrating, beyond just my own problems of forgetting that purely digital things exist with such incredibly selectiveness that I’m boggled I don’t forget that any book or movie exists the instant I take my eyes off it (though I bet all the unread and unwatched physical books and movies I own would argue that I do, in fact, forget they exist the isntant they’re on the shelf or even just moderately out of sight). The whole concept can be a thorny issue for a lot of people because, most of the time, we essentially own a digital item by the grace of the platform it exists on or the market we bought it from. Aside from the potential legal repercussions (and the legal protections pertaining to the digital sphere are incredibly outdate and uninformed at present), there seems to be almost nothing stopping a platform from doing whatever the fuck it wants. We’ve all heard horror stories of people being locked out of iTunes or Amazon accounts, forever losing access to all the music, movies, audiobooks, and digital books they bought through them. There’s also the example of the absolutely disrespectful decisions Unity has made recently, shifting their pricing models such that they claimed to be able to charge people retroactively in a way that doesn’t match any of their prior business models, with no way for the people who used their game engine to opt out of this incredibly exploitative cost structure. If all you’ve got is the ephemeral license to use something that exists digitally, there’s little you can do once that gets taken away.
What really drove this point home for me was watching things disappear out of my NOOK library while I was talking with support. Without asking permission or prompting me at all, the support person removed the books I’d bought from my library and tried to add them back. Unforunately for them, it took the books five mintues to reappear in my library and this maneuver did absolutely nothing for me other than teach me that if my device is connected to the internet, someone at a third party support company could access my digital library and remove items from it. And if they decided to make the removal permanent, there was nothing I could do about it since the person who’d made that choice was a member of the support staff that I’d have to go to in order to rememdy this problem. It was a long five minutes, while I waited for the books to come back, and it was not an experience I’m eager to repeat.
The other side of this that comes up frequently is the preservation of old video games. There’s a lot of games and even movies or TV shows that have just disappeared from existence because they existed digitally and all records of them have been deleted. That’s why people get so passionate about media preservation. Without active effort and a whole lot of people doing the work, things will just disapppear completely. Almost nothing is safe without deliberate and potentially onerous safeguards. I mean, one of the Toy Story movies (Toy Story 2, I think) almost got completely deleted when someone accidentally purged Pixar’s data storage and only got saved because someone had brough a copy home with them to work on, removing it from the network and any command that might have deleted it as well. Without layers of backups and a whole network of safety rails, some things might just disappear forever because someone unplugged the wrong thing or a bug in a piece of software causes the master data file to be corrupted. It’s absolutely horrifying to think about, just how easy it is for digital media to disappear.
Honestly, the more I think about this, the less I’m okay with it. Sure, it’s great to be able to buy a digital book and know that it will already be downloaded on my tablet by the time I get home, but maybe I shouldn’t leave my devices just connected to the internet all the time. I’ve already stopped most programs from auto-updating because my phone is old and no longer supported by most app developers (plus, I REALLY didn’t want Twitter’s app icon to change to that ghastly “X”). I mean, I’ve got an exercise bike that only works if I use the fitness app made by the company that produced the exercise bike and I’m incredibly paranoid that they’re going to eventually stop supporting the app or demand I stop giving them fake biometric and personal data (my current user is named Fuck You, was born on April 20th, 1969, and uses the email address I made for the twitter account I used to cuss out idiots on Twitter until it got permabanned in 2020, which I’m only not typing here because I don’t want to attract spambots or junkmail). Which, you know, kind of sums up my whole attitude about all this. I really hope we get this shit figured out sooner rather than later. I’m tired of agnozing over whether or not digital purchases are worth the risk, especially since we’re in a world were thinks are increasingly only available digitally.