Pretty interesting question.

99% of the eBooks you purchase are not actually “yours” in the sense we associate with physical goods. What you purchase is a license to keep and access the file containing the book and, through it, gain knowledge of the content, the story so to say, for an undetermined duration, that meaning “while you meet the terms and conditions of the seller AND the owner of the intellectual property”.

Most of the time this means that you’ll be able to read your eBook for years to come, as many times as you wish. Convenient and affordable, yes?

However, things can happen, and have in fact happened in the recent past.

• The author changes her/his mind, thinks her/his novel is terrible and wants the book out of circulation. Well, authors have the right to ask publishers to remove books from wherever they are, and they must comply. With paper this is quite difficult to do, as you can access only what is still in warehouses and on bookstore shelves but, if you have it on your own bookcase at home, they cannot take it from you (they don’t know where you are!). BUT with a Kindle THEY CAN, as it continuously “calls home” to update and sync content, so you might wake up one day and realize a certain book is no more on your Kindle, and your account has been refunded to compensate (maybe). But no more book. And no, they don’t need your consent for this.
• Similar to above, the publisher decides to stop selling some title for some undetermined reason. You “purchased” it but, at some point, deleted it from your Kindle/Kobo/Nook, although you were not worried because it was stored in their Cloud, so you could download again whenever wishing to give it a go; hell, this is a feature they sell it as an advantage all the time. Well, now that the publisher doesn’t have it available any more, it is not on your Cloud anymore! Oh, the T&Cs say that, well, you should make a copy in case things like this might happen… Oh, no, sorry, no refunds.
• You do something that annoys the seller/publisher and goes against their terms and conditions. Say, you create an account as if living in the UK when in fact you live in, say, Sweden. You purchase lots of eBooks in English, which are normally not available in Sweden because the publisher does not want to sell them there for some reason. You are happy. Some day, the digital book seller (Amazon?) gets wind that your UK address is not for real and your IP is actually in another country where you should not have access to those eBooks, as per their agreement with the publisher. Next day you wake up to discover your whole library in your Kindle is empty and your account has been canceled. No refunds are issued as, hey, it is your fault, you dirty cheating rat, how you dare buying books from your godforsaken country; the nerve!

Further proof that they are not “yours” is that you cannot:

• use them on any device of your liking, but just where the seller/publisher authorizes you to.
• lend it to a friend, particularly if he’s not buying from the same seller you do.
• give it away to anyone as it will be encrypted and locked with your account info
• sell it second-hand for the same reason as above

Actually, the saddest part is that most of these restrictions would apply also to paper books BUT we’re lucky that in practice cannot be enforced simply because they cannot locate and access them.

The publishing industry has taken the opportunity of using technology to enforce their twisted ways instead of using it to empower readers. So, this is why so many people loves digital BUT first thing they do after “purchasing” (OK, licensing) a title is using some naughty software tools and removing the encryption and locking bits, so the files can now be stored and used wherever they want without fearing the stories above to happen to them…