B&N Decides That Purchased Ebooks Are Only Yours Until Your Credit Card Expires

To stay with the real world analogy: while the article is right that nothing will glue the pages of a physical book together once the credit card expires, it is also the case that purchasing a book once doesn't entitle you to go to the bookstore and demand another copy of the book because you lost your initial one.

I can see a technical reason which prevents the redownload by locked accounts. Or rather, I can imagine the additional work such a feature could require - work that obviously isn't going to be paid for by anybody (or rather paid for by customers who do have valid accounts and buy more media) - the card of the affected account is expired after all.

IMHO, if we want to demand that an electronic media purchase is a traditional sale, then we can't rurn around and demand that it also isn't and that we should have right to infinitely ask for additional copies - however cheap it might be to create them.

oh Yes, We can. The reason we're entitled to it is the fact that DRM stands in the way of us customers backing up our purchases. If my eBook were in a format devoid of DRM & I could back it up by saving it in Droppbox or my external hard drive, then your argument would carry some weight.

Over the years my subconcious has grown used to indexing the story according to certain physical properties of the book. "Oh yes, that happend about a cm in on the right side page, like halfway down" is something I might think- but this coordinate system doesn't work with an e-reader. Seeing the cover art each time counts, too. I also rather like (and miss) the small stains, tears and incidental damage that normal books get. There's also the matter of distraction - now that my book is a device I can't help but fiddle with it. Finally, even though the quality is very good on my Nook Touch, I can see the pixels and I find it distracting.

Maybe some or all of these concerns will go away in time, but then there's also the (rather stunning) fact that ebooks are MORE expensive than the paperback - this, even though the cost of production is negligible, and typically you can't share or bequeath your e-library, etc.

And then on top of all these objections B&N does something asinine like this...let's just say that I'll be perfectly happy reading paper books for a long long time.

I compare the ebook readers as a physical object with the books (also physical objects). If I can read books on that device even when my credit card has expired or other things have disabled my account, then IMHO the parity to the real world exists: I have that one physical object which represents the content on it. If I lose it and don't have my account any more, well, too bad.

Of course, by centralizing many books to one physical object, you risk losing much more content as you lose that physical object. But the advantage is that, in case it breaks, it can be repaired (which might be impossible with a physical book)

Now. I know for a fact that this is how Kindle works: even if your account is gone, your books stay on your Kindle and you can continue to read them. I would assume it works the same for B&N in this case.

Being able to infinitely redownload the books is a nice convenience that goes far beyond what a physical book would allow.

Also, I haven't tried it, but these DRMed books are just files after all. It might be possible to back them up and later read them on the same device (again the physical book analogy) even if the account has been terminated.