Reminder that relying on electronic books means your research and reading habits can be tracked and stored for later analysis.
Hope you aren't an anomaly, have interests / read material that could be used against you or are similar to whatever society thinks the boogyman du jour reads.
With the restrictions the Wassenaar Arrangement can set up, you'd be surprised how quickly many of your mundane professional interests will put you on the radar.
As a researcher I read your first sentence and envisioned something much more positive than where you took it. Imagine being able to see a record of every page of every book a researcher looked at when putting together their own manuscripts. This would enable discovering gaps in knowledge, and could also serve as an extended bibliography that beyond just what was remembered and cited.
The Library Awareness Program operated in secret during the 80's and sought to collect those records.
Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired in May 2015, but there is great interest in reauthorizing the rights granted to the federal government from that section. For 14 years, the government had the right to track your library usage and issue gag orders to librarians involved.
To say they destroy those records would be an oversimplification. Fighting the government is hard when you're issued a warrant from a secret court and are facing serious prison time for not obeying it.
If you knew the material you were interested, say "alternative music"[0] might put you on a list, would you check the book out or try to stay off the library's inventory system?
With electronic books, browsing is checking out is an expressed interest in what can make you seem like a terrorist/spy/hacker/who knows to systems that are used to identify enemies of the state.
Hope you aren't an anomaly, have interests / read material that could be used against you or are similar to whatever society thinks the boogyman du jour reads.
With the restrictions the Wassenaar Arrangement can set up, you'd be surprised how quickly many of your mundane professional interests will put you on the radar.