Speaking Volumes

 Apparently, the company that had provided the electronic copies of these titles did so without permission, thus the copy purchased was illegal and had no right to be sold. In response, Amazon remotely removed these fugitives from the devices of those who had purchased them. Later they commented that perhaps this had not been the best course of action.

 

This troubles me on so very many levels.

 

First, let me preface this by saying I am not a Kindle or electronic book fan. Personally, I as much as I love gadgets and electronics I don’t like to ‘read’ on screen. As a  Librarian, I don’t like electronic books for a number of reasons: it’s expensive equipment easily stolen and broken if used by the masses. Kindle’s licensing in particular states that it cannot be circulated among library patrons and I had always had concerns about the stability of the text. By this, I was thinking – hard drives crash. How many of us have lost papers, software, music because whatever machine we had downloaded or saved to suddenly went tilt? True, my print text could fall into a puddle of water or something, but this is definitely within my control. The crashed hard drive is definitely not.

 

When purchasing such e-books, one is advised of the ways they are not really ‘book like’. They cannot easily be shared, traded or re-sold. They are dependant upon a power source and are certainly not “green.”  One cannot easily pick it up, scan it’s pages, etc.  There are no easy options for notes in a margin, highlighting and so forth.

 

But this news story has provided me new twist to think about. Sure there are the clear issues of intellectual property. There are issues of copyright and sales. There are the issues I’ve seen raised by irate purchasers: they BOUGHT the book and now they don’t have it!  Will they get reimbursed? But what troubles me the most is… how could Amazon erase these books off people’s gadgets? Just like that - a decision in an office and the contents of something on my night stand, that I didn't realize was communicating back to its home planet, changes: poof.

 

Now, I don’t really literally mean – how in terms of technology – wifi, cell phones, satellites – I know even super spy technology exists… but think about what this means. If Amazon in some corporate office can hit a button and the book that you downloaded on your free standing machine can disappear, what else can happen? Can “they” know what your reading?  Can "they" know where you are? A human GPS?  What about what page you’ve lingered on? Can "they" erase other things from other places?  "They" know when we search the site, but now "they" know things from the free standing equipment that is your 'book'.

 

Several years ago when cable boxes were first introduced, I remember reading an insert from the company that assured customers that while the technology was there for that box to work as a camera, capturing images from the home and transmitting them back to the cable company, this would of course not happen.  I wish I had kept that brocure, but at the time, I just laughed.  Some times I waved to the box, after all you never knew.

 

Now, I find this idea... uncomfortable. Okay, I admit that this all sounds a little paranoid and I might be sounding like Moulder or a conspiracy theorist. I am not really worried about this… but on principle, I don’t like it. Big brother maybe watching, but he does not have my permission to play with my toys.

 

 

For more information about the Kindle story see: