So far I've just seen one story but I expect there will be more: Joel Johnson has a post up on nbcnews.com with the title, "You don't own your Kindle books, Amazon reminds customer". To which I am tempted to say both "No duh" and "Welcome to the party." But I shall resist.

I've been going on about e-book evils a good bit lately, but they do have undeniable appeal. As someone remarked to me privately, you can torrent down today more e-books than you could read in the remainder of your lifetime, no matter how old you are, and carry them around on a piece of hardware smaller than your thumb. Try doing that with physical books. Touche'.

Joel Johnson, it seems, would like at least for vendors of goods like e-books (that you don't actually own) to be required to tell you that you're not actually "buying" the thing when you click that button that says "buy." That seems a thin solace for the mess we're currently in, but at least one can hope that giving it some more attention will lead to more ideas. Maybe, as Gizmodo suggests in the image it put with Johnson's story, every iPad and Kindle should come with a big "OPP" label.

(h/t Cory and Boingboing for the original pointer)