[throwaway8941]

Thank god I store all my learning material (among other things) offline, so that my education doesn't have to depend on firefighters from the other side of the planet.

[blub]

A wise choice, but the economics are a bit different from cloud software, like Adobe: the costs for books and training videos can add up to several thousands of € per year and most of that knowledge will become obsolete in a couple of years.

Many tech books should probably be rented, while the classics and very good ones should indeed be bought.

[pritambaral]

That's an argument for _allowing books to be rented_, but not an argument for _disallowing books from being bought or downloaded_.

Besides, your argument is already served by libraries. The problem in this case is the publisher wants to be _the library_.