Dude, is your question for real? Just because you hang out with those people, you think it's not necessary for books to be transferrable to kids? It's currently possible to pass on books, DVDs, MP3s to kids, and a corporate-controlled future where that's not possible without them getting a cut is a stupid future.

I really don't think their point was that it's not necessary for books and other physical media to be transferable to kids. I saw it more as an anecdote that I think probably a lot of people would, unfortunately, nod in agreement with.

To your point, however, I do agree. I think one of the major benefits of physical media (or even digital media as long as it's entirely self-hosted) is that you can enjoy it entirely without surveillance, and that it's much more resistant to censorship. Being able to read about and understand how people lived, thought, and created in the past is incredibly important, and it's something we should preserve for the benefit of future generations, even if they might sometimes contain things that one might not necessarily agree with today.

> you think it's not necessary for books to be transferrable to kids?

Where did I say that? Obviously it is nice to be able to hand things down to one's children. But what I am questioning is whether the envisioned scenario (children of the future being enamored by dad or granddad's old books) is really likely to happen.

It's the inferred interpretation. Fine, your lawyer could go to court and successfully defend that you didn't utter that question, but in my mind you're arguing that would future generations even want to read books, so should we even care about e-products being transferable?

> Do you think your kids will want to read their ancestors’ books?

Maybe they will and maybe they won't, but how are we to know that with certainty today? The whole point is that if the opportunity is taken away now, then that guarantees that they won't be able to in the future. Beyond that, they would also lose the possibility of otherwise sharing them with someone else who might be interested in reading them, and I think that would be a loss as well.

The best books I own & re-read are over 30 years old.

At the same time, most every decent library should own a few copies of them. They're all well known, at least in their industries niche.

I think there's something to be said for having the physical object that belonged to someone you knew. For example, I was recently given my mother's collection of 7"s. Yes, they're completely impractical by today's standards and I can find almost all of those songs on Spotify, but the collection included her handwritten index and notes scribbled in the columns about memories connected to the various songs in it.

I don't have a specific example in mind, but I'm sure the same applies to books people have inherited from friends and family. People write all sorts of interesting notes in books, tuck photos in between the pages, etc. These items offer a connection that a library book or its digital equivalent (often) cannot.

Yeah, I have a dictionary that belonged to my grandfather, which is in the language he spoke. It's just a generic, paperback book, but the physical item has meaning to me. I can't imagine a $Language Kindle dictionary would have remotely the same relevance.