apparently there are moves afoot to make rentable ebooks that will time out after you’ve been reading them for so many hours. on the one hand this is clearly ludicrous as we all read at different rates and some of us like to go back and reread parts of a book again more than others do. on the other hand every fiction ebook i’ve downloaded and read has been deleted after i’ve finished it. if i wanted to keep these books about for posterity i’d get or make a print copy and put them on my bookshelves. i think the idea of making ebooks more like library books is a good one in general. ebooks are vastly overpriced and if they reduced the prices by a factor of five ($1 instead of $5) i’d be more likely to buy them even if i knew they were going to time out on me.