When the world begins to digitize, are you ready?

Editor's note: How many people know what Amazon is doing with their money? Readers of this article now know that Amazon has spent a lot of effort to lay out the Kindle series, in preparation for a vigorous "content revolution". and the Kindle library is exactly what Amazon is prepared to do with the "Content book field". So let's hear what Gigaom's Mathew Ingram say.

Amazon's "Borrow library" function actually means that another kind of traditional media, books, is also becoming a rental or streaming media mode. Readers can no longer have the physical media that hosts the information, just like Netflix has a short information lease. And we have plenty of reasons to prefer renting or streaming: like cheaper, and we don't have to store heavy books, CDs or DVDs. And theoretically, people can get what they buy anywhere. But there are drawbacks to this model, and the rental model is changing the way we relate to information, and this change is not always good.

J.P Mangalindan, a wealth writer, once revealed his concerns about Amazon's rental model, including the lack of cooperation with any of the six major publishers. The reason publishers do not want to co-operate may be the fear of piracy, or the fear that the model will have a huge impact on traditional books and e-book sales.

But Mangalindan said the library had not been a very good experience for him as a consumer, because "this allows readers to give up the consumer product that is the ownership of the content of the information," and turn it into a rent read. This is exactly what Spotify and other music streaming services, such as Pandora or Rdio, are doing to music, and what Netflix does with video: The shift is now so widespread that the competitors of the information physics carrier are at risk of bankruptcy. Of course, the accessibility of high-speed Internet is the foundation of the industrial revolution behind.

Why do I need physical media when I can browse the Web?

In the not-too-distant past, many people think that one day all of us will be placing huge servers in our own house, and we can store dozens of G or even dozens of t of movies, music, photos and other electronic information. Many people have bought or built a home media server at home. I have one myself, next to the TV. But when I look at the hundreds of songs and movies that are stored in it, I wonder what it means to have data, since we can enjoy convenient and diverse services online.

Obviously, since the radio was invented, music can be appreciated online, but companies like Spotify have expanded this online model to meet all of our music needs, not just the songs we happen to hear on the radio. Television is also one of the original online services, but Hulu and other services allow us to free ourselves from this little box and to choose the video we want more freely.

Now Amazon is introducing this model into the book industry. We have a library for centuries, and in the library we can "borrow" physical books, and we can borrow books from friends, and Amazon extends this concept to any book, any time. Even now we can only borrow one for one months in the Amazon library, and we can't lend it to anyone. Will it not be in the near future, when we look back on the history, we would feel that there is a book-filled bookshelf is a very nostalgic thing, just like someone collects old newspapers, someone collects old records, someone collects card tape?

Borrowing also changed our legal rights

In addition to challenging human possessive desires and collecting desires, borrowing means also alters the legal relationship between us and the content of consumption. Amazon used to remove copies of E-books from People's Kindles in the past after being complained of by the original author, and these copies were bought by people, not borrowed. So, the way the books are borrowed like Netflix also makes people have to face the fact that we don't really have a book, we buy only short-term use rights.

All online streaming media forms face the same problem. Netflix has revised its terms of service to increase the price of physical DVD rentals, and what if Amazon changes the terms in which you listen, watch, or read access to information? Amazon is very happy to delete documents that WikiLeaks placed on its platform, although this does not involve any infringement issues.

As a result, the online form of information acquisition does bring many benefits to users, such as cheap and rich choice. But the new model also deprives us of many of our original rights. This is the same as renting and buying a house.

As the world becomes more and more digitized, we also need to learn to adapt to more things.

by GIGAOM