Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries. Though you can read a book through, say, Google Books, or on a Nook or Kindle, it’s laborious to save what you see to your computer and truly make the book your own. With cloud-based services, one “master” copy of the book is always online, but that makes it vulnerable to manipulation or even deletion.

Jonathan Zittrain: ‘Digital books are under the control of distributors rather than readers’ Wired UK.