Society & Culture / Media & Communication / Publishing & Knowledge Dissemination

You Don't Own Your E-Books: The 500-Year War Over What a Book Really Is

Simon Rosenberg

Think you own your digital library? Think again. In this deep dive, we unpack Simon Rosenberg's groundbreaking research on the three hidden values of a book—economic, content, and symbolic—and how they’ve shaped a brutal 500-year war over reading. From Gutenberg’s fake manuscripts to Caxton’s 15th-century clickbait, from Victorian rental monopolies to today’s DRM chains, discover why the physical book refuses to die. Rosenberg reveals why your Kindle library is just a rental, how industrial greed turned books into dust, and why a shelf of paperbacks is now an act of rebellion. If you’ve ever felt the anxiety of losing your digital collection, this video will change how you see every book you own.