A rose is a rose is a rose, but if you purchase an e-book written by Gertrude Stein, it isn’t what it seems.

When we bought literature in paper form, the “hardware” and “software” were ours for as long as we held onto the physical item, but virtual books (and articles, films, etc.) are leasing agreements that depend on all sorts of infrastructure remaining intact. And to quote the title of the most famous book by another author, Chinua Achebe, things fall apart. When the next companies destabilize today’s tech giants, Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple, will there be a hole in the culture that’s difficult to recover?

From “When Amazon Dies,” an excellent piece on the topic by Adrienne LaFrance at the Atlantic:

Increasingly, the purchase of digital works is treated like the purchase of software, which has gone from something you buy on a disc to something downloadable with an Internet connection. “You might think you’re buying Microsoft Office, but according to your user agreement you’re merely leasing it,” [media studies professor Siva] Vaidhyanathan said. “You can think of music and video as just another form of software. There is a convergence happening.”

That convergence is built for a streaming world, one that’s driven by an expectation of instant gratification. “One of the things we’re doing increasingly is opting for convenience over dependability. And we’re doing it somewhat thoughtlessly,” Vaidhyanathan told me. “We have to recognize that it is temporary. Anything that is centrally collected in a server somewhere on Earth is ephemeral. Even if Amazon doesn’t go out of business in 20 years, Amazon will not exist as we know it in 100 years.”•