Big Kindle is Watching
Posted on July 19th, 2009
by Clark Stooksbury |
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Score one for Gutenberg. The New York Times reports that Amazon.com deleted books from Kindles that weren’t supposed to be sold. I am probably the millionth person to note the irony that the books deleted in such a Big Brother fashion are George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. I checked, and I have copies of both books still on my shelves.
I wrote in Chronicles a while back that “one doesn’t have to be a Luddite to see the limitations of the appeal of such electronic media—especially given the almost instant obsolescence endemic to nearly every kind of electronic equipment.(Imagine how unsatisfied those who pay $400 for an Amazon Kindle that holds 200 e-books will feel when version 2.0 sells for half the price and holds twice the text.)” It never even occcurred to me that Amazon.com would be surreptitiously deleting books from Kindles. I guess it never occurred to their customers either.
Filed under: Books, Culture, media
Is this supposed to be a real argument?
(Imagine how unsatisfied those who pay $400 for an Amazon Kindle that holds 200 e-books will feel when version 2.0 sells for half the price and holds twice the text.)”
I don’t know, when I was in grad school and had a couple thousand books, it was a real pain in the neck to schlep them from place to place. Finally, I gave up and sold most of them to a used book store for beer money.
Every means of communications has its limitations. Books are durable, but heavy. The problem with the scenario you describe isn’t so much the limitations of electronic devices, but the fact that copyright law doesn’t recognize ownership in the electronic manifestation of the book the same way as it recognizes ownership of the physical book itself. Reform copyright law and you get the right outcome. Pay once for 1984 and keep it forever.
From the first day I heard that the name of this product was “Kindle”, it brought to mind Fahrenheit 451. I guess they’re living up to (my interpretation of) their name.
In all fairness, I paid half as much for this laptop as I did for my last one. It’s twice as fast and has twice the storage capacity.
But the Amazon debacle paves the way for a bit more golbalism. Apparently those books are public domain in half the world.
Hopefully Kindle will inspire some other company to start selling a cheaper, DRM-free (that stands for “digital rights management”, but the term is a misnomer as the rights certainly don’t belong to the purchaser) reader that has a similar screen and better memory.
I expect that such readers will be hugely successful but will not kill print at all. Most of my friends have mp3 players (I don’t), but we all spend more on vinyl than on any other format. Why? Because it’s nice. They look good, the old ones are cheap, the new ones are beautifully packaged (and sometimes come with free mp3 files) and the places that sell them are fun to visit.
Wow! The irony. While I can understand why Amazon wanted to delete these items; the manner in which they did so leaves a very uncomfortable feeling.
I don’t own a Kindle, and now I am questioning whether I want one or not.
[...] (Baltimore Sun’s Read Street blog) Amazon sends Orwell to “memory hole” (AFP) Big Kindle is Watching (American Conservative) Amazon recalls (and embodies) Orwell’s 1984 (CNET [...]
[...] Big Kindle is Watching [...]
Six months ago bloggers (notably Stephanie at UrbZen) warned about this kind of thing.
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/kindle-see-we-told-you-so/