Are eBooks experiences or books?

Is an eBook an experience or a thing?

That's the question Beth Bacon asks in her article today at Digital Book World. It's an intriguing question that leaves print books out of the equation and rather than focusing on the similarities and differences between the two, zooms in on how we as readers conceive of the ebook itself.

In her article, Bacon digs into the debate around what you can do with an eBook. Is it OK to lend it to someone or is that piracy, like with music? Should you be able to read it on different devices? And, most provocatively, she asks:

Do we purchase the “ideas” contained in the eBook’s words and pictures? Do we purchase the “experience” of reading it once or twice or a specific number of times?

Wow. When I first read those sentences I thought, that's a silly question. When you buy any art, you are buying the piece of art, whether that is a book, a painting, or a song. And you are at the same time buying the right to experience that art however you like.

But when I thought about it more, I realized she's asking an important question. When we buy print books, we're free to read them and give them to someone. When we buy eBooks  we're not free to give them away. And even if we were, do you know how to do that? It's pretty complicated.

I would argue that the "thing" we are buying is a digital file, and I would say we will end up dealing with it somewhere between the way we deal with online music and software for our computers. You buy the rights to use that digital file for yourself, but not the rights to share it with others. At the same time, there is no way to currently control the sharing, hence the proliferation of copyrighted songs on YouTube and pirate copies of software on Craigslist.

So for me, an eBook is more of a "thing," in that it is a digital file. You experience the file. Sounds a little dry compared to a book, but the content is pretty much the same, so the experience can be huge.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of Sutherland Shire Libraries via flickr