Amazon's Kindle, 1984 and the future of reading
Amazon's apology for swiping 1984 from its customers' Kindles hasn't stopped the debate over that issue -- and over the broader subject of e-books. Yet the Kindle owners I know don't seem to be bothered by the controversy, and they're uniformly in love with the convenience of the devices. Last weekend, I offered to lend a book to a friend who was visiting from Connecticut, and he said, "Don't bother, I'll download it." What? For your reading pleasure, here are excerpts from recent reports on the e-book issue by NPR, The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times:
-- Los Angeles Times: For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than commerce that shouldn't be merely bought and sold. Because of that, it's not the incidents themselves but their ramifications that are disturbing: the idea that Amazon can effectively alter the collective memory at will.
-- NPR: Larry Bowen, an administrator at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa thought that he would miss books when he bought his Kindle, but that hasn't happened. He thinks his transition to digital reading has been eased by his experience with downloading music to his iPhone.
-- The New Yorker: The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. ... This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?
Comments
Dave, I don't blame your friend for wanting to download a book, rather than borrow it. This way, he can read it when he wants to and he doesn't have to worry about guarding someone else's property.
I absolutely LOVE the grayish screen on my Kindle. It's SO relaxing for reading.
I have been having a little problem with my Kindle, who is angry that I now know that Kindles can kill! Yes, that's right -- kill. And I wrote a short story about it: "The Kindle Did It," in The Gift of Murder, a holiday anthology of crime stories, to be published in October by Wolfmont Press (for the benefit of the charity Toys for Tots.)
Posted by: Gail Farrelly | August 4, 2009 4:16 PM
I've owned a Kindle since March and I LOVE it. Yet although I could foresee Amazons ability to reach into my Amazon account and thus into my Kindle. I didn't know about the hidden DRM (copyright) I didn't know that the Kindle terms and conditions state digital content is licensed to the user, but not owned by them. "Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon."
As a Kindle owner I NEVER saw the copyright restrictions and NEVER agreed to them.
In essence I can PURCHASE books and yet I will never OWN them! Due to the DRM built into the Kindle. So if I ever cease my relationship with Amazon my books (which I thought I OWNED) will disappear in a puff of digital smoke.
Thus Amazon misleads its users, by offering to sell them the ebooks and yet it is only renting them out.
Posted by: Marianna | August 5, 2009 12:32 PM
Big Brother lives on! I can't think of anything more ironic than having 1984 digitally eradicated by faceless bureaucrats. Gosh we don't even need to burn the books anymore.
Posted by: Richard May | August 6, 2009 8:29 AM