Amazon Kindle: Digital Book Burning
January 21, 2012
Amazon’s Kindle is appropriately named, as to kindle means to “catch fire” or to “cause to start burning” (Wordnet 3.0, n.d.). The newest generation of Kindle products support the downloading of books without even having a computer connection, allowing the consumer to get a new book “anytime, anywhere” (Amazon.com: Kindle, 2009). At first glance, this type of technology seems to offer the consumer amazing freedom, flexibility, and opportunity. Coupled with this convenience, however, is the ability of Amazon to control what one reads, censor materials, violate a user’s privacy, and even attempt to circumvent their own Terms of Service and renege on the customer’s “non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use” (Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use, 2009).
In June and July of 2009, Amazon.com removed a few titles (including Rand’s The Fountainhead, and Orwell’s 1984) from their Kindle Store, citing a seemingly noble cause of attempting to protect the intellectual property of the publishers (Manjoo, 2009). Though this action may be a disappointment to consumers wishing to purchase the respective eBooks, the removal of these titles is not, in itself, unethical, illegal, or cause for any type of alarm. However, Amazon.com took their supposed pursuit of nobility a step further and wirelessly connected to their customers’ Kindle devices and removed their already-purchased copies of said titles. Not only did this action break their Terms of Service mentioned above, but it also brought digital censorship to a daunting new level.
This is an interesting conversation on the topic of software and hardware limitations, spy software and the crappy world of proprietary software
Before digital copies of books, physical copies could be sold without any method of recovery. To clarify, when one purchases a book from a store (assuming cash is used instead of a cheque or credit card), there is no method for the vendor to attain information about that individual’s identity, including his or her whereabouts. This means that if the book is recalled, banned by a government, or goes out of print the publishers, vendors, and law enforcement authorities have no hope in retrieving previously-sold copies of the book without the individual’s consent. Thus, the individual would have complete ownership of the copy, and could do with it what he or she wills. Further, this lack of circulation tracking means that it is very likely that a printed copy of a work will exist somewhere in the world, even after publication has ceased. With Amazon’s ability to track, modify, and even remove titles from Kindle devices, this ’complete removal from circulation’ security is no longer present. In theory, a book that is distributed solely in electronic form could be tracked and completely eradicated from existence! What seemed at first to be a lovely convenience can also be seen as a surveillance tactic and, worse yet, a totalitarian approach to censorship.
Source: z-issue.com
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