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(NaturalNews) I love Amazon.com. It offers the most pleasant online shopping experience in the world, and its rating and recommendation systems are remarkably good at predicting what you might like. But as the world's largest e-commerce company, Amazon.com also has a lot of power over consumers, and last week that translated into a truly Orweillian stunt by Amazon that deleted copies of the e-book 1984 from Kindle devices everywhere.
When I first read the news, I couldn't believe that books you buy on Kindle could be remotely deleted by Amazon.com -- without notice and without your permission. That this actually took place (with the Big Brother book 1984, no less) brings up some very scary realizations about Amazon.com's Kindle book reader:
• You apparently don't really own the books you buy through Kindle. You're just granted a temporary rental at the pleasure of Amazon.com, which may rescind that "right" at any time, without notice.
• If Amazon.com can delete one book off your Kindle (without your knowledge), it could delete them all. What happens when the U.S. government begins banning books (you know, books about freedom, or the U.S. Constitution, or how to make a backyard mortar out of PVC)? Will Amazon.com initiate a global delete process to remove any "illegal" books from your Kindle?
• If Amazon.com can delete books from your Kindle, it also stands to reason that it could modify books on your Kindle without your knowledge! Can you say, "Revisionist history?" One day all the books seem somehow... simplified...
• History is full of Police State governments that banned books and burned books in an attempt to limit the People's access to knowledge. Is Amazon.com now engaged in digital book burning?
• It's not just Amazon.com that's acting out the themes of a police state dictatorship: Don't forget that Google, Yahoo and other technology companies have openly cooperated with China's censorship schemes that have continued an inhumane state of political oppression in that country.
• The advantage of owning a real book (printed on trees) is that no one can take it from you without getting past your front door and your German Shepherd. Plus, the screens don't crack and the batteries don't run out. You can set a book down when you need a pause, and when you pick it up you'll find the page right where you left it. Amazing...
Just say no to DRMThe Amazon.com Kindle device is, by definition, a DRM device (Digital Rights Management). DRM is a term describing technologies that limit the ability of consumers to exercise control over content they've paid for. Record companies, of course, are famous for their battles over piracy, and for the longest time they insisted that downloadable music only be sold with DRM protections.
Ironically, Amazon.com now sells DRM-free MP3 music, as do many other websites. But that evolved only after years of heel digging and foot dragging by the brain-dead music industry that would have much preferred to keep the world stranded in the days of cassette tapes (where bootleg copies get progressively worse with each copy generation).
Today, you can't buy downloadable audio books without DRM limitations, nor can you download movies without DRM. This content-compromising technology is everywhere, seeking to limit your use of content you've already paid for.
That Amazon would sell DRM-encoded books on its own proprietary Kindle device is really no surprise: Selling DRM-free electronic copies of books that could be widely pirated could threaten Amazon's entire business foundation. Amazon sells books, after all. (Physical ones, printed on paper, with free shipping under their Prime program.)
How to turn your physical books into digital booksI have a much better solution for consumers: Just buy the books at a local bookstore, chop off the binders, scan them and OCR them into text files. Then you can read them on any device (such as a Sony Reader, or your laptop, or whatever).
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009
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