Amazon’s “Kindle,” and the End of Freedom

By now I imagine most of you have heard about Amazon’s new exercise in absurdity, The Kindle.

I introduced and condemned the little piece of hardware in the more introductory article that ran in the April issue of the Viewpoints, which you can read on their website. What you are reading now is the article I intended to write.

At any rate, all you really need to know for now is that the Kindle 2 is an e-book reader, allowing you to store up to 1,500 digital books and read at your leisure.

The following video is off the Kindle 2 main page, and is good for some laughs. Where they dragged these people from, I don’t know, but they seem to have come from some alternative universe where books are actually carved into stone, with pages that require minutes of sweated straining to turn, and with writing that is cryptic and requires hours of studying to decipher. Nor do I know how much they paid them to say the kinds of things they do. Note their word choices and the way in which they articulate the difference between the Kindle 2 and “regular old books”; namely, they don’t (special, imaginative kudos to the wonderful argument made by the lady whose sole contribution consists in repeating the words, “it’s better than a book.”)

And don’t feel like you have to finish the video, or anything. It’s painful.

Tycho and Gabriel, mercifully, delivered the only suitable antidote (click to enlarge):

Anyway, as we move into the real heart of the issue, what’s important to note about the Kindle 2 is that it is not Wi-Fi powered, but rather is always connected Wirelessly to Amazon, in much the same way as a phone. You can’t disconnect it from the Amazon network, it’s always there. Keep that in mind.

Moving over to an an interview with the Washington Post, Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer remarked that, “there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”

And this is a serious problem. Physical books enjoy certain conveniences unique to physical matter: You can lend, borrow or give them away. This is due to the fact that when you buy a book, you own it. It is yours to lend to friends, give to your children, donate to a library, take anywhere and read as often as you like. This is not true of Kindle books, which you do not actually own in any form, physical or digital. David W. Boles, a blogger at Urbansemiotic.com and Kindle 2 owner, noted that in the original model of the Kindle, there was an SD card slot, but this produced problems with Amazon’s ability to control content:

“The control issue I discovered,” Boles writes, “was if you moved a book to your SD card, Amazon could not remove the book from your Kindle. They could remove the book from your online storage and from the Kindle’s active memory, but if your content was on the SD card, Amazon could see it on your Kindle, but they could not remove or edit the content.”

This “problem” has since been corrected on the newer model of the Kindle, giving Amazon complete control over the books which were supposedly owned by the consumer.

“Make no mistake about it,” Boles writes. “You do not own the content on your Kindle. Amazon does.“

Meanwhile, on the Kindle homepage, Amazon states, “This is just the beginning. Our vision is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds on Kindle. We won’t stop until we get there.” And when that happens, there won’t be any more books. If Ballmer is right in predicting the death of print, there will easily come a time, very soon, when all books, all newspapers, and all information rests, not in individual or even in public libraries, but in the hands of one or two companies. Imagine a world where everyone owns a Kindle, or equivalent, and there are no books at all. None. No newspapers. No magazines. Fascinated by their new portable library, consumers will give away their old books and magazines. No one will save newspapers anymore. Print will die, and all information will be in the hands of Amazon and its competitors.

And so we return to the ownership issue. With a company owning basically all printed information, and with no way to disconnect your Kindle from the Amazon network, the information can be changed and edited at will. If the company decides a book should not be available, out it goes. If some minority group decides that a particular author is racist, the text can be changed, updating it with more politically correct jargon. Upon realizing this I had flashbacks to the whole “controversial” issue surrounding the use of authentic dialogue in such authors as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad (how would you like to crack open Huck Finn and see the words “African American?”). But aside from the disemboweling of great literature, the really disturbing point is that the Kindle also supports all major newspapers (and many, many more), magazines, and famous blogs. This is supposed to be convenient, but I don’t find anything convenient about the fact that this information is always at the mercy of the e-book distributors. Further, that changes to the content on your Kindle is untraceable. Why? Because you, the customer, do not own this material. You are paying Amazon to lease it.

Now, of course Amazon will deny all of this, because at the moment, they have no reason to control the world of information (that I can see of, anyway). They will point to all of these things as conveniences for the consumer, or else as necessities so people don’t cheat the company. Apparently, on the first Kindle, people could buy books, transfer them to their computers, and then ask for refunds, thus grabbing copies of e-books for free. I see and respect that as a concern for a company, so I’m not saying that Amazon is evil or setting out to conquer the world. But I believe what Ballmer said. It is very probable that print will die in the next ten years, and when that happens, whether intentional or not, the way of the future seems to put world information in the hands of e-book companies, and whoever might pull on their strings.

For now, though, they’ll keep bragging that they want every book ever printed and the utmost convenience for the consumer. But don’t expect that to last. No, one day when there are no more hard copies, odd things will start happening. Changes will take place. And when that happens, there will be nothing anyone can do about it.

So please, for the love of all that is holy, save your books, don’t purchase the Kindle, and spread the word.

EDIT: You may also enjoy reading the very concise point Cory Doctorow makes in his article, here.