More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Christian Science Monitor contributor labels Kindle a ‘Trojan horse’
March 18, 2009 | 11:16 am
|
By Chris Meadows
The Christian Science Monitor has posted an article about the dangers of the Kindle today.
Monitor writer Emily Walshe is concerned by the Kindle’s DRM and the closed nature of the Kindle store. She fears that, “In our rush to adopt new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of its twisted sister, access.”
Walshe warns that the restrictions Amazon places on use of the Kindle and Kindle purchases mean you are not really buying “a book” when you buy a Kindle e-book; you are buying access to a book. She fears what this might mean for the future of the idea of property and of our culture, and compares Amazon’s usurpation of e-property rights to Facebook’s recent attempt to claim ownership of users’ personal information.
Print may be dying, but the idea of print would be the more critical demise: the idea that there needs to be a record – an artifact of permanence, residence, and posterity – that is independent of some well-appointed thingamajig in order to be seen, touched, understood, or wholly possessed.
(Ironically, the Christian Science Monitor recently became one of the first papers to end its print distribution in favor of the web.)
Various TeleRead writers have been making the same arguments for some time, but it is good to see them being aired in yet another respected publication.
(Found via Fred Kiesche linking the article on the Baen Bar’s baen.EBookReader newsgroup.)
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
She is exactly right. You are buying restricted access to an ebook when you spend money on a kindle book. Which is why I have only purchased a handful of books on my kindle in the last year. Most of these are throw away potboilers that equate to a cheap paperback. Although it still irks me that I can’t pass my ebook on to somebody else when I’m finished.
Even with DRM I should be able to resell or trade my ebook by a simple transfer of rights. Amazon sells downloadable music that is free of DRM. But the idea of DRM free ebooks probably scares them to death since they will see it as a threat to their core business. My guess is that they hope to acheive total dominance of the ebook market in which case they can keep the onerous DRM and just tell consumers to take it or leave it.
Amazon’s implementation isn’t particularly good for authors, either. We authors feel that we have to be available there because of Amazon’s reach, but they take a whopping 65% of the proceeds! Sure, publishers take more, but when there *is* no publisher, why should Amazon take so much? Lulu.com sells the same book and takes only 20%. What’s up with that?
And BTW, you’re still subject to returns. I’ve had two of those this month. Why anyone would be so cheap as to return a 99-cent e-article is beyond me, but someone did.)
I just blogged about learning this the hard way after my Kindle broke. You say it better than I did — you’re buying access not the book and at a high price too!
http://blogs.sun.com/joehartley/
This is a good post summarizing that what you get with the Kindle is the right to read not the right to own.