My grandmother’s apartment had a bookshelf that ran the length of one wall. Most of the books on it had her maiden name written inside the front cover in handwriting she didn’t use anymore. Some had been hers since 1962. Some had been mine, on loan, for a decade. All of them were, in the most literal sense, hers. If she dropped dead tomorrow, they would still be on the shelf.
That is no longer how reading works. Digital ownership, as a concept, has quietly dissolved over the last decade. Not all at once, but a feature at a time: a backup disabled, a device cut off, a store shut down, a license expired. This is an essay about what it added up to.
What ownership used to mean
Walter Benjamin wrote an essay in 1931, unpacking his library after a move, called Unpacking My Library. Its most quoted line is this: ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to things. Not use. Not love. Ownership. A book you had read ten times and returned to the library was not the same as a book that had sat on your shelf for those same ten years unopened. Ownership meant the thing persisted when you were not looking at it.
A collection was a kind of self-portrait. Where you kept a book mattered. Losing one was real. Borrowed ones came back, or they didn’t, and that was also real. The point was that there was an artifact of your reading life that was continuous with you.
Then the reading moved onto rented floors
The first Kindle launched in November 2007. Comixology launched the same year. WEBTOON started in Korea in 2004 and opened its English platform in 2014. Over roughly fifteen years, most of my reading, and the reading of basically every English-speaking manga and manhwa reader I know, moved off the physical shelf and onto the rented floor of someone else’s server.
Digital promised more, and in many ways it delivered more. I can read a 90-chapter manhwa on a Tuesday evening without having waited three years for an import. I can finish a hardcover on the bus without lugging it. For fifteen years the trade seemed obviously good.
The trade-off was quiet at first. It wasn’t the storage or the eye-strain. It was this: you could read anywhere. You just couldn’t keep anywhere.
The library you don’t own
On February 26, 2025, Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" feature from Kindle accounts. Until that day, you could open the Manage Your Content and Devices page, select a book you had bought, and download it to your own computer as a file. From there you could copy it onto any Kindle in the house, or, more importantly, back it up.
What disappeared on February 26 was the last sanctioned way to make a copy of a Kindle book you had paid for and place it somewhere Amazon didn’t control. The company offered no public explanation. Reporters inferred the motive was to close the last DRM-removal loophole. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: every Kindle book is, now and forever, a file Amazon keeps and you rent access to.
The state of California made the arrangement legally explicit three months earlier. AB 2426, effective January 1, 2025, requires digital storefronts to disclose that buying a digital book, film, or song is a revocable license, and prohibits the word purchase without that disclosure. California didn’t change the arrangement. California made the arrangement stop pretending.
And then, in April 2026, as I was writing this, Amazon announced that on May 20, 2026, thirteen Kindle devices released in 2012 or earlier will lose the ability to buy, borrow, or download from the Kindle store. If you deregister one of those devices after May 20, you cannot re-register it. Thirteen generations of hardware, most of which still work mechanically, become paperweights on a single Wednesday. Amazon is offering 20% off a new Kindle and a $20 eBook credit to affected owners. That is the trade.
This is not a Kindle problem
It is a Kindle example. The same pattern runs almost everywhere the reading and the watching is.
Amazon folded Comixology into the Kindle app in early 2022 and fully retired the standalone Comixology app in December 2023. Thousands of readers discovered that their My Lists and Recently Purchased sections, the artifact of years of collecting, had been flattened into an undifferentiated Kindle library.
In March 2023 Nintendo shut down the 3DS and Wii U eShops, making roughly 1,547 3DS titles and 866 Wii U titles legally un-buyable. Several of them have no other legal storefront.
In December 2023 Sony announced it would delete around 1,300 seasons of Discovery-owned content from the PlayStation libraries of customers who had already paid for it. Only the public reaction led to a reversal, and the reversal was a 30-month extension, not a restoration of ownership.
In January 2024 Google Play Movies & TV shut down. In December 2017 Microsoft killed Groove Music; anything that hadn’t been downloaded to a local machine before that deadline became unreachable. In October 2025 Crunchyroll quietly removed Claymore, Death Parade, and 91 Days when their license terms expired. Death Parade is not legally streamable anywhere in the US as of this writing.
What this has to do with manhwa
A lot. Japan’s manga market went 76.1% digital in 2025, per the AJPEA Research Institute for Publications. Physical manga volumes fell 14.4% year-over-year, the steepest single-year drop since the industry began measuring. In Korea, the webtoon platform count started consolidating for the first time in 2025: KOCCA recorded 17.9% fewer new webtoons registered in the first half of 2025 than in the first half of 2024. Smaller platforms are closing.
BookWalker Global, the main English-language digital manga and light-novel store, changed ownership in March 2025, from BookWalker Co. to a different parent company, M12 Media. In February 2022 the same platform removed Sol Press and Panty Press titles at publishers’ request. Readers who had "bought" those books found their libraries smaller the next Tuesday.
The reading is moving further onto rented floors. And the floor gets rearranged without warning.
What we lost isn’t the books. It’s the collection.
Most books are findable somewhere. That’s not really the problem. The problem is that the artifact of your reading no longer exists. The spine that fell apart because you reread it too many times. The marginalia you made in high school and forgot you made. The order of your shelf. The date you finished each one. The knowledge, visible in one sweep of the eye, of what you had been for the last fifteen years.
Benjamin, from the same essay: the most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed. The circle is what the platforms dissolved. They gave us more books and took the collection.
Cory Doctorow, in Enshittification, published by Verso in October 2025, calls the thing we actually need the right to exit — the ability to leave a service with your data, your network, and your purchases intact. None of the major reading platforms grant it. Most of them never did.
What I started to do about it
I buy print now when I can afford to and when I can find it. Not because I don’t read digital — I read digital all the time — but because I want at least one copy of the books that matter to me that cannot be deregistered. US print book sales turn out to be reassuringly stable: 762.4 million units in 2025, per Publishers Weekly citing Circana BookScan, essentially unchanged from 2024 (782.7M) and 2023 (778.3M). The physical book didn’t die. It survived as the durable format while the digital proliferated above it.
I tried a spreadsheet first. It worked. It also felt like its own small chore to maintain, and I stopped opening it.
And for everything I read digitally — manhwa, webtoons, anime, light novels — I started keeping a local list. Not a cloud-synced list. Not an account I log into. A file, on my own computer, under my own control.
That was the specific thing I built ManiShelf to solve. A small Mac app that keeps your manhwa, manga, anime, and light-novel library on your own machine, not in somebody else’s cloud. You catalog what you’re collecting, track chapters and episodes, mark favorites. If a platform disappears, or an account is banned, or a subscription lapses, your list is still there. You can back it up the same way you back up any other file. No accounts, no cloud sync, no tracking. If you’d like to take a look, the app lives at oitoana.dev/manishelf.
The shelf my grandmother kept along one wall wasn’t a feature, or a subscription, or a service. It was a record. She’d built it a book at a time, over a lifetime, and it was legible to anyone who walked into the room. That’s the thing I’m trying to put back, in a form that works for how we actually read now.
Common questions
Do I really not own my Kindle books? Not in any legal sense. Kindle books have always been licensed, not sold. As of California AB 2426, effective January 1, 2025, digital storefronts in California are required to say so in plain language.
What changed on February 26, 2025? Amazon removed the "Download & Transfer via USB" feature from Kindle accounts. Until that date it was the last sanctioned way to back up a purchased Kindle book as a file on your own computer.
Is this the same thing as when Amazon deleted 1984 in 2009? Philosophically yes, legally different. In July 2009 Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles after a rights dispute. The Gawronski v. Amazon class-action settlement limited when Amazon can do that again. The 2025 change is the other side of the same coin: Amazon didn’t delete anything, but it made backup impossible and deletion easier.
Are printed books actually dying? No. Print book unit sales in the US have been roughly flat at 760–790 million units per year across 2023, 2024, and 2025. The digital share has grown; the physical share has held its ground.
What should I do if I have an older Kindle? After May 20, 2026, thirteen pre-2012 Kindle models will lose the ability to purchase, borrow, or download from the Kindle store. If you have one and want to keep using it: don’t factory-reset or deregister it after that date; re-registration won’t be possible. Amazon is offering 20% off a new Kindle and a $20 eBook credit to affected owners.
- Anastasiia