More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Real time error correction on the Kindle – should it be done?
September 5, 2009 | 1:14 pm
|
By Paul Biba
Reader Gerald McFatridge sent me this link to an article, Facts, Errors and the Kindle, by Anthony Gottleib in the Economist’s Intelligent Life Magazine. The short article discusses factual errors that appear in books and other publications. In part, he says:
Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. … Earlier this year Amazon caused an outcry by deleting electronic copies of some books from its customers’ Kindle reading devices when it emerged that the editions were illegal bootlegs. But would anyone object if electronic copies were replaced, by remote control, with corrected versions? Such updating would be far less expensive than printing and distributing a new physical edition, though no publisher has yet announced plans to do any such thing. Craig Silverman points out that publishers might find it attractive to stay in touch with electronic-book purchasers by letting them sign up for e-mails with news of corrections. Buyers of books about Nietzsche might be interested to hear that his famous remark is taken out of context from notebooks that were not intended for publication, and that he certainly believed in the importance of facts.
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
News of corrections would be good.
Remotely changing the file on my reader is something else entirely. I don’t like the idea of anyone messing with the files on my reader without my prior knowledge and permission. Ever.
I like to read my Kindle books on my iPod Touch but the iPhone works equally well. And if I had had the deleted book (which I didn’t), and had copied it to my iPod Touch (which I do have), I suspect that Amazon would have been unable to remove it like they did on the Kindle. And if Kindle were sincere that they would NEVER do that again, they should upgrade the code on the Kindle to make it impossible for even them to ever do that again — if you could trust them. But I’m sure Jeff Bezos would never authorize anyone working for him to ever do that again, and I’m sure the decision to do so was a lower level decision taken without his knowledge in advance.
Nothing tough about this question. Since we’re basically talking about an upgrade of a file, it should be handled the way all upgrades are handled: Give the consumer the choice to have automatic updates, or to be informed of updates and the power to decide which updates to accept.
While offering corrections as a customer optional upgrade is probably a better option, on the technical side of things annotations will be an issue. Any changes to an existing file will likely shift or drop annotaions unless an underlying mechanism is in place to compensate for the changes.
Let me see, getting a corrected Kindle version with the typos and formatting errors corrected? Works for me.