ownership in the digital age

Amazon just sneakily announced that you’ll soon be unable to download their eBooks to your system from next week onwards.

The catalogue of 500+ books I’ve purchased from Amazon (i.e. worth £4000+ ) doesn’t really belong to me. I’ve already had scenarios where Amazon have removed access to a book that I’ve previously purchased.

One of the key principles of the indie web is owning your data. Take this blog, its just markdown files on my computer, run through a static site generator. I own all of the content.

This should be the same with all of your digital media.

It took about 40 minutes to download my entire catalogue. I’m out!