Kindle: Big Brother?

Amazon has basically confirmed that I will never ever ever buy a Kindle. They've been going out of their way to pitch them as an awesome alternative to actual books. In some senses, they're right: they're environmentally friendly (assuming the enviro-cost of printing a book including trees, shipping, etc exceeds the up front cost of making a Kindle and downloading it), they're convenient, they're possibly even cute, possibly even portable, and if the technology keeps improving, might one day be as pleasant to read as an actual printed book (non-page flippy feeling aside).

Amazon's big problem, aside from the Kindle's absurd up front price, has been convincing people it's exactly like books. Amazon is basically a shopkeeper in Vietnam insisting the Kindle is: "same same" as the book I'm holding.

Sounds great right?

Except that last night, in something that approximates irony, Amazon remotely deleted every purchased copy of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm (you can't make this shit up) and refunded the money. The word is that the publisher got cold feet about e-books, and Amazon helped them assuage their fears.

As the blogosphere has pointed out, this is like a publisher getting skittish and arranging for the bookseller to bust into your home after a purchase and taking it back from you, leaving you a cheque. This sounds ridiculous because it would never happen: there's no reason to do it, and it's wildly impractical, to say nothing of illegal. It could never happen if the Kindle were actually book-like.

But what happened here demonstrates why the Kindle is nothing like a book. The situation is the same: a publisher got skittish and wanted the books back. The differences? Amazon had a reason (they got bullied by the publisher and caved), it wasn't that hard to do (they had the technology to delete stuff post-purchase), and they presumably had the legal rights to do so (I can only imagine what the end user license agreements on that are). Same same, but different.

The practical compu-nerd in me can't help but wonder why the post-purchase deletion option even existed. If it didn't, Amazon would have tied its own hands and prevented themselves from being bullied. "Sorry, the book is out there.." they'd reply, in a tone reserved for publishers who got itchy about that whole 'printing press' technology, "...we can't go break into their houses, even if photocopiers make you a little skittish."

The actual computer-nerd realizes that it's something that would be fun to put in as a feature. "Not only can you put books on there, but you retain master control and can delete them! Woohooo!"

And outside that realm there's the realization that people in the content creation/distribution business (be they book publishers, movie producers, software developers, etc) have been shifting this idea of ownership out of our hands for some time.

Those of us playing PC games saw this awhile ago: I can buy a video game, but I can't give anyone else a copy. That sounds reasonable. But sometimes the technology means I can't even lend it to a friend. It sometimes means I can't play it at all, such as when my Red Alert CD developed a hole in it (CDs, as you know, aren't permanent, they eventually start to degrade), and the copy protection refused to play without a working disk in the drive, and I was given the option of paying $15 for a new replacement CD. Thanks, but no thanks.

So our concept of ownership has already been slapped in the face and we seem to be okay with it. We still buy video games and we still buy DVDs. What's new here is that it's not about video games or movies or music. It's about books. Trusted technology that changed the world in a bygone era and trigger feelings of nostalgia that are hard to replace. Most of us have a relationship with books that's a bit more emotional, more memory-filled, than the one we have with video games or DVDs. Amazon's been trying to get us to let go of page flipping by trying to make it seem as close as possible to the old thing. Their actions fly in the face of this effort.

And that's why I'm not buying a Kindle.

Link:

NY Times: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/