The point is certainly worth considering. I would personally consider myself more interested in truly owning the things I buy more than the average person, insofar as I regularly purchase and rip my own CD's so that I control the format, strip all of my Kindle books of DRM using Calibre, and contribute to the development of free software and free/libre operating systems so that I can be in complete control of my PC's hardware.

With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:

1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.

2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.

3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.

To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.

Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.