The market is going this way because people want it. Streaming music instead of owning it is slowly but surely winning out (think YouTube, not Pirate Bay). The analogy is not renting it, but subscribing to a service like cable TV. (Though a minority will always want to own).

A subscription model for books is essentially the library system. Either you pay yourself to belong to a private lending library, or the community makes book downloads available through the public library.

Obviously there are issues to be worked out about the privacy of your computer and so forth, but these really are minor hiccups in ironing out what it is people actually want (hysterical copy-fighter rantings notwithstanding).

We’re seeing it with music already, the monthly fee for access to a huge library – access that stops if you miss a payment. Unless we really believe that all this access will be “free.”

Mostly what Doctorow is talking about is the internet acting as the library – that is where almost all of us discovered our favourite books and it didn’t cost us anything. And it is what turned us into book buyers.

The problem is that the library isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed and we shouldn’t be looking for more ways to keep kids from getting off their asses and leaving the house.

No-one should be mad at Doctorow for his own success as a writer. But yes, his copyright analogies are ridiculous (not to mention hypocritical), and make most of his arguments in that arena very difficult for me to take seriously. He is the boy who yelled “Fascist.”