Kindle and Orwell

I have to admit that I don't get Kindle, and I don't get ebooks in general. I don't understand why anyone bothered to invent such things. It wasn't as though there was a huge outcry for reading Pride and Prejudice off of a LCD screen (or whatever sort of surface they've come up with to replace it).

Books remain, I think, a superior technology for most of what we use them for, and because of that are not likely to disappear any time soon. But that is a topic for another day. This entry is about the fact that we seem to criticize ebooks for the wrong reasons. For example, Nicholson Baker doesn't like ebooks because...well, uh...here, you tell me. Many other writers have started up an anti-Kindle effort because of what happened with some users' copies of Nineteen Eighty Four several weeks ago. Briefly, the story is this. Amazon had some issue over copyright on the book, so they pulled it, not just off of its shelves (so to speak) but also from customers who had already purchased the title. The book disappeared into thin air: as not a few commentators have noted, the resonances with Orwell's story were just too resonant for the media to ignore.

Aha, said the critics, you see the problem now. Unlike a paper book, you don't actually own an ebook. It doesn't exist on your Kindle--it exists up in "the cloud", and all you have paid for is the right to access it. On the seller's terms. If you had actually bought the book, Amazon couldn't have taken it from you. Their copyright problems would have remained that: their copyright problems. You still would have your copy. And extrapolating from this particular incident, Kindle seems to make for a very convenient method of censorship. Any time that there is a problem with a book--any kind of problem--Amazon can just pull it. The users may wail and cry, but as long as Amazon refunds their fees, there's not much they can do.

So, yeah. Censorship. Which is a bad thing, for sure. But also not a new thing. There are lots of ways of censoring information. The publishing industry does a pretty good job of keeping about 90 per cent of what is written from most of us. It can do this because of economies in scales in terms of printing books, distributing books, getting some books displayed in book stores and not others. You already knew that. But the thing is that Kindle allows authors to bypass a lot of this crap. Theoretically, at least, the same kind of long tail economics could work for Kindle as for other sorts of new media. But it also has new, different ways of keeping books away from us; or even taking them away.

Because of the way we talk about communication, and more specifically because of the way that we have always talked about the impact of the printing press, we tend to think about media forms in terms of all or nothing: they are precursors to a new democratic revolution, or they're going to lead to the ultimate panopticon. But in terms of the freedoms allowed, most media forms give on some fronts, and they take on other fronts. The Kindle is probably going to be like that. At least, if it's anything like any other form of media introduced into the Western World in the past 2,000 years.