Electronic books are just as good as regular books, they say. Only it's more convenient to read, because you can carry thousands of books in your hand, and you can turn pages with the click of a button.
Yeah. Right.
Amazon deleted books off people's Kindles. Books they had paid for. Amazon says they were published in the online store by someone who didn't have the rights to do that. They should take better care to make that not happen.
But more importantly, if they can decide you shouldn't have something you bought, and delete it from your device, they have a lot more power over you than in the old kind of book purchase. I might be willing to accept that I can't lend a copy of a book to a friend in a new world order. But the idea that my access to the things I've bought (music, books, movies) is subject to a single corporation's whim? That's not worth it to me.
Which is exactly what Orwell was warning about in 1984 and Animal Farm. Which are the two books that Amazon deleted. Natch.
No comments:
Post a Comment