My Paperless Life-author learned the freedom and price of living digitally.

Some irony in this story.



There's another important aspect of control: With a paperless life, you have a greater ability to measure how you consume media, such as in these charts, which depict the pace at which different readers enjoyed a short story. Most people do not imagine ever wanting to chronicle something like this—after all, none of this measurement is possible with printed material. But just as services like Mint.com have enabled us to measure and derive new insights from our personal finances, I predict that we will soon demand the same data from the books we read.

This control cuts both ways of course: If you can control your media more easily, then others can as well. Companies can restrict how you store and retrieve your e-books in entirely new and perhaps unsavory ways, such as prohibiting you from lending an e-book to a friend's device, or by reclaiming a book that you've already purchased, as occurred last summer when Amazon remotely deleted two books by George Orwell from users' Kindles. (The company has since apologized.)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-25/my-paperless-life/