Print is Dead

An independent guide to books, publishing and reading, on paper and on screens.

Do you own your e-books? DRM, licences and lending

When you buy a printed book you own a copy. When you "buy" an e-book you usually get a licence to read it on terms set by the store. Here is what that means in practice, and how to keep the books you pay for.

Last reviewed October 2026

A copy versus a licence

A printed book is a physical thing. Once you have bought it you can read it, lend it, give it away, sell it second-hand, write in it or leave it to someone in your will. In US law the right to resell or give away a lawfully bought copy is known as the first-sale doctrine; many other countries have an equivalent principle, often called exhaustion. The publisher keeps the copyright in the text, but it loses control over that particular copy once it is sold.

An e-book purchase usually works differently. Read the terms of use of the major stores and you will find that what you acquire is a licence to access the content for personal use, subject to conditions. The store keeps the right to change the service, and the file is often protected by technology that controls where it can be opened. You cannot normally resell it, and lending is possible only when and how the store allows.

Courts have not been sympathetic to attempts to stretch first sale to digital files. In 2018 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Capitol Records v. ReDigi, held that a service for reselling digital music files was not protected by the first-sale doctrine, because moving a file from one person's computer to another's creates a new copy. The case was about music, but the reasoning applies to digital files generally, and the court said that anyone wanting a different rule should ask Congress.

What DRM is and what it does

Digital rights management (DRM) is the umbrella term for technical measures that restrict what can be done with a digital file. For e-books it typically means encryption that only authorised software can unlock. In practice DRM can:

Publishers use DRM to discourage unauthorised copying. Critics, including many librarians and some authors, argue that it does little to stop determined pirates, who remove it easily, while making life harder for paying readers and locking them into one retailer. Some publishers have chosen to sell e-books without DRM, and several independent stores and many small presses sell DRM-free files as a matter of policy.

In many countries, including the United States under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it is generally unlawful to circumvent DRM, even on a book you have paid for, with narrow exceptions. That is why "just strip the DRM" is not advice we give.

When the store can take the book back

The difference between owning and licensing usually stays invisible. Occasionally it becomes very visible.

The 1984 deletion, 2009

In July 2009 Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. The editions had been added to the store by a third party that did not hold the rights, and Amazon refunded buyers. The choice of book made the story irresistible, and Amazon's chief executive publicly apologised, calling the way it was handled a mistake. Amazon later offered to restore the books, and the episode has been cited ever since as the clearest illustration that a licensed e-book on a connected device is not the same as a book on your shelf.

Store closures

Stores close too. In 2019 Microsoft shut the book section of its online store. Purchased books could be read only in its Edge browser, so when the store closed the books stopped working, and Microsoft refunded customers. The refunds were fair, but the books were gone. Anyone who had built a library there had to start again elsewhere.

Quiet edits

Because e-books are delivered from a server, a publisher can update the file, and a device may download the new version. That is useful for fixing typos. It also means the text you own is not necessarily fixed: when a publisher revises a book for a new edition, a connected device may replace the version you bought with the revised one. A printed copy cannot be changed after the fact.

Lending and sharing

Within the rules, e-books can still be shared:

What you cannot usually do is the thing that is most natural with a paper book: hand it to a friend and forget about it.

How to keep the books you pay for

None of this means e-books are a bad deal. They are convenient, often cheaper, and for many readers the store will be around long enough. But it is worth reading with your eyes open.

  1. Prefer DRM-free when you can. If a book is sold without DRM, download the file and keep a backup. A DRM-free EPUB will open in many reading apps and will survive the store that sold it.
  2. Download what you have bought. Where a store allows it, keep local copies, and know that a device which syncs automatically may also update or remove files.
  3. Buy print for the books you want to keep for life. A printed copy can be lent, resold and inherited. Many readers buy the e-book for convenience and the print book for the shelf.
  4. Use the library. For books you will read once, a library loan avoids the question of ownership altogether.
  5. Check the terms when you choose a store. Look at whether the store lets you download files, how many devices you can use, and what it says will happen if it stops selling books.
  6. Look at public-domain sources. Books whose copyright has expired are free to copy and keep. See copyright and the public domain.

Will this change?

Pressure for change comes from several directions. Library groups campaign for fairer digital licences. Consumer advocates argue that the word "buy" should not be used for something that can be withdrawn. Accessibility law, such as the European Accessibility Act, requires that e-books and the software used to read them work with assistive technology, which constrains how restrictive DRM can be in practice. Legislators in several places have considered rules on how digital purchases are described and what buyers are entitled to. None of this has yet produced a general right to resell or freely lend a digital book, and the legal position described above remains the starting point.

For a broader view of where e-books sit in the reading landscape, see print versus digital and our guide to e-readers.

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