Paper books and CDs are an expensive pain when you move to another home, plus they take space and make you spend money in bookshelves. I&#x27;d love to be able to zip all my books :-)  At least I can&#x27;t lose the right to read them (unless <i>very bad</i> things happen).<p>Loaned books and not returned: same thing with files if cloud service will ever let you do that and you can&#x27;t make a copy for yourself. However they could let us set an automatic return date. That will solve the problem. The point is: why bother if they won&#x27;t make money out of it? Pay a little fee to borrow or to lend?<p>Accidentally burned vs accidentally deleted: same thing. Only the ability of backing them up is going to save you. Or a cloud service unless we are ruling it out for the rights issue.<p>Degradation: hard to say. Ebooks haven&#x27;t been around for enough time to say how many of them I could lose in the next years. However I still have files from the mid 90s so if one really cares about them it&#x27;s probably safe to say that they won&#x27;t be lost. I can probably read some cassettes and floppy disks from the early and mid 80s if I bother to switch on their original hw (and if it works). However it&#x27;s a vastly larger pain than reading an old book on aged paper. My parents have some of those books from the early 20th century and we can read them. Obviously they might have thrown away other books and it won&#x27;t be the case if those books were bits.<p>Still: without cloud services are we going to be able to read epub or mobi in a 100 years? And with cloud services how many books won&#x27;t be available anymore by then because of policies, politics, commercial rights, censorship?