Something kept me up last night: I realized my Kindle holds over 300 books, while my physical bookshelf only has about 50. Then came the anxiety-inducing thought: what if Amazon went bankrupt tomorrow? What if all our digital books just… vanished?
We trust our most precious stories to the cloud we can’t see, owned by companies that might not exist in 50 years. Sure, digital books are convenient, environmentally friendly, and let us carry a whole library in our pockets. But they’re also, in a way, just extended rentals. We don’t truly own them like we own physical books.
Meanwhile, I can still read my grandmother’s 1940s copy of Pride and Prejudice, complete with her teenage thoughts written in the margins. Will our grandchildren be able to inherit our digital libraries? Will they find our highlighted passages and digital notes, or will our reading lives disappear into the digital void?
In this increasingly digital age, are we trading true ownership for convenience, and should that scare us more than it does?
