Posts Tagged eBook

Remember the whole hulaballoo about three weeks back, when Amazon.com remotely deleted editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from the Kindle devices of customer who had already purchased them?  When Amazon discovered that the books had been added to the Kindle store by a company that didn’t actually own the rights to those books, it deleted those editions and automatically refunded the customers.

Ok… that’s understandable.  But they deleted the books after readers had already purchased them.  And without so much as a “heads up” or “please”: readers simply woke up one morning to find the books missing from their Kindles.  And readers didn’t just simply lose their spot on the page.  The New York Times relates:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Amazon has since apologized for the gaffe, and is looking into revising its systems to avoid a repeat.  Nevertheless, the mini-scandal has raised some fascinating discussions about the ramifications of reading in the digital age.  Brad Stone at the New York Times points out that:

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

(Unfortunately, some of these problems aren’t unique to books.  Digital products aren’t your everyday products.  When you make certain digital purchases, they belong to you… sort of.  Ever heard of DRM?)

David Ulin at the Baltimore Sun sees Amazon.com as a sort of Big Brother figure that has tossed these books down the memory hole.  (Talk about irony.  As Jessika on Middle Raged Punk says, “Poor Orwell.  It’s a good thing he’s not alive to see this.”)  Ulin also sees books as a “collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than commerce that shouldn’t be merely bought and sold.”  But Amazon.com is the behemoth of the book market, and has an almost complete strangehold on the eBook market.  Does this grant the company, then, the power to alter collective memory at will?  Ulin thinks it does.

However, over at NPR, Linda Wertheimer hosts a discussion with a few “eBook converts.”  Despite the potential hiccups that come along with purchasing digital media, they beleive that overall, eBook technology is still a step in the right direction.  Jonathan Gootenberg, a media and technology consultant, explains that

what makes up a book depends upon the content matter, it depends upon the use, and depends upon the individual and how they perceive it… It’s the ability to access the content, the ability to read it wherever I want and the ability to search it. I mean I there’s huge value in being able to find things within books in a much easier fashion than you can in a printed book.

Even Wertheimer is a fan:

Every once in a while I find myself brushing the top right hand corner with my hand like I’m going to turn the page. I’m so into it that it just doesn’t register as different from a book.

What do you think?  Was this a hiccup in an otherwise exciting and promising industry, or a doubleplusungood sign of things to come?

-Naomi