[project1dev] kindle vs freedom
- From: eric drewes <figarus@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: project1dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:54:01 -0400
*Will Fahrenheit SMS Be the End of Books?* TMQ has friends who like the
Kindle; maybe such devices are the future. But I hope you were given pause
by Amazon's decision to delete, electronically and without notice, two
Orwell books that were sold without proper
rights<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10289983-56.html?tag=mncol;txt>.
Needless to say, I support enforcing authors' rights. Yet did you know
Amazon has the power to delete from your Kindle anything it decides you
should not read? Owners who had the books in their devices simply discovered
them gone: Amazon sent a kill command. Suppose printed books -- and their
permanence -- go out of style. Everyone's got Kindle-like gizmos that seem
really convenient. Then Big Sister or some corporate leader finds out people
are downloading books revealing information the powerful don't want the
masses to know. Click click, those books disappear, and there's no printed
copy to prove they ever existed. "We did this for the public good, the books
contained statements that were causing confusion," a future CEO or U.S.
President may say. Or suppose a book about some prominent person has
revelations embarrassing to him -- you wake up and that material has
vanished, replaced with new paragraphs calling the person the most wonderful
human being who ever walked. Remote wireless manipulation of book content,
under the control of the wealthy and powerful -- is this really the
direction we want to go?
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