Archive for July 27th, 2009:

The controversial Kindle incident of 7/17, in which a few hundred U.S. Kindle owners discovered that Amazon had mysteriously removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from their e-book readers, was not just a thundering irony. Although Amazon has explained (it was a copyright infringement issue), apologized, and promised not to do it again, the episode (referred to by Thomas Claburn of Information Week and others as a “virtual book burning”) has generated heated debate about the nature of e-media, who really owns it, and the awesome—some might say scary—powers of its purveyors.

Writing for the Guardian Book Blog, Sam Jordison observed:

As this story has shown, if someone wants to stop you reading something and they have control of the device you read it from, it’s all too easy [ . . . ] It’s been tough to make books disappear in the past because they tend to be scattered so far afield. Now, it seems, words can vanish at the flick of a switch.

Jordison continued:

The question of whether it is safe or wise to blithely hand over so much of one of our most important industries and so many of our treasured freedoms to the gatekeepers of this revolutionary technology is an entirely modern one. The issue that underlies it, however, is one of the very oldest: who will guard the guards?

Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo posed similar questions about the implications of a company’s power, or a court’s mandate, to disable access to (or ban) art, literature, music, or other e-media at its discretion, noting:

Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely [ . . . ] This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we’ll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.

Ultimatley, Manjoo said (citing cyber law expert Jonathan Zittrain), the danger lies with the fact that advances in “tethered technology” (e-readers, smart phones, and other devices that we buy and physically possess, but which are subject to remote control by the companies that sell them) are out-pacing the law.

It will be interesting to see how the law catches up. In the meantime, many readers are finding that the question of whether to embrace the Kindle (or any other e-reader) has gotten a lot more philosophical.

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