On July 17th, hundreds of Kindle owners woke up to learn that transactions they made in good faith were apparently no longer valid, and that their
legally purchased copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm had been taken off of their Kindle readers and their money returned. The same thing also happened
to Atlas Shrugged, The Night Of January 16th, The Virtue of Selfishness, and one other whose name escapes me, all of which were written by Ayn Rand. As an aside for those of you who do not know it,
Apple has a similar 'kill switch' for their IPhones, in order to "allow Apple to remotely delete malicious or inappropriate applications stored on the device".
Amazon has said that they will change their policy so that they will not remove customers' books again in such a scenario. What I find far more disturbing however, are what Amazon has not said, which books were pulled, and the fact that even many of those who have voiced complaints do not seem to realize the full implications of what just happened.
Amazon has stated, in response to the outcry, that they will change their policy so that in such a situation, people will not lose the novels they purchsed in good faith. What they have NOT said is that they will alter the way Kindles work so that they will be physically unable to go in and rescind sales without the owner's consent. In other words, they promise to be good and we'll just have to trust them.
Second, the books that were taken. Everyone here probably knows who Orwell is and has no issue with him. But Ayn Rand was an American author who despised socialism and was a huge advocate of laissez-faire capitalism and the free market, so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a) many of you have never heard of her and b) many of those of you who have heard of her don't like her. But I'll paraphrase you a quote from Atlas Shrugged, and when you compare it to what happened with the Kindle readers, you'll understand why I find it rather chilling and prophetic. "We can't mention censorship yet. They [the people] will rise up in arms against it. They're not ready for it. But if you just make it a simple material issue, just a matter of paper and printing presses, then you accomplish the exact same goal much more easily." Or in the case of Amazon, if you just make it a simple matter of an illegal sale, which must be rescinded....
Finally, what many people who are up in arms about the Kindle scandal don't seem to realize is that if Amazon can reach into your Kindle and delete your purchased book without your consent, who is to say they can't do the same in order to edit your purchased book without your consent. A dead-tree book is immutable; once you've bought it, it's yours and if the publisher made a mistake selling it to you, too bad. If the publisher made a printing error, it stands as is. But what if, instead of deleting Animal Farm and 1984, Kindle had simply gone in and painted the pigs as heroes freeing their fellow animals from opression and Big Brother as a benevolent figure who was the hero and chief benefactor of Oceania? What if, instead of deleting Atlas Shrugged, they merely rewrote the ending so that Galt's Gulch was what ended up dying and the totalitarian society Galt was trying to fight was what ended up successful? Then what if they took these rewritten editions and switched the books on your Kindle, without your knowledge and consent, so that you would have the originals on one day, the new versions the next, and no evidence at all to tell you that it was your memory that was correct and your Kindle at error?
But this is inconceivable, you say? Then how about a more realistic example: history textbooks are moved from dead-tree to Kindle, and when new editions come out, instead of having to go out and buy a new history book, the old edition is simply replaced by the new on your Kindle. What's wrong with that? Nothing, if the new edition simply corrects the mistakes listed on the book's errata. Everything, if you're attempting to rewrite history to sanitize it for today's PC culture or delete things deemed undesirable by the current government or culture. During the Civil War, slaves who ran away to Union army outposts were labeled "contraband" by the soldiers so that they wouldn't have to be returned to their owners. Every written reference had to refer to these people as property, and monetary values had to be attached to their persons in each. This is only one example of something you will NEVER find in any of today's history textbooks; I learned it from a colleague who is an archaeologist. Bad enough when this happens to dead-tree books; at least in such a case you have the old editions available for comparison. How long would that remain true though, once history books were switched to Kindle with the great deal attached that your textbooks would be automatically updated?
But there is no way that Kindle or anyone else could gain that kind of control over the information network, you say? But our information network is being transferred into an digital, inextricably interconnected format at an astonishing rate. We've all heard the newspapers lament that it's becoming harder and harder to remain in print. We all know that there are only 2 major popular book sellers left in the nation (Borders and B&N, and according to my friends who are Borders employees, Borders isn't doing so hot financially). Is it really so far-fetched to imagine that 100 years from now, all newspapers could be online and all print books on systems similar to the Kindle? And if that ever becomes true, does anyone really want to think about how easy it would be for someone to establish a "Ministry of Truth" of their own? One of the lines from 1984 was, "He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past." Today I'd rewrite it, "He who controls literature, controls the mind. He who controls the Kindle, controls literature."
I only hope that fifty years from now, I won't have to replace 'Kindle' with 'internet'.
