By now most of you reading this blog probably know about the latest dust-up over ebook prices. For those of you who haven’t been following the news, here’s a brief synopsis followed by some thoughts on the history of book pricing.
A couple of weeks ago officials at Macmillan, one of the largest global book publishing firms, decided to put the screws to Amazon.com. For over two years now the retailer has insisted that $9.99 is the decisive threshold at which consumers will begin trading reading material composed of atoms for stuff made of bits. Reportedly it’s managed to sell three million Kindles and who-knows-how-many e-books, but still Macmillan begs to differ on the matter of pricing. Management there believes that a more flexible scale would be preferable to Amazon’s flat-rate, with new e-titles starting at $15 and older works listing for around $6.
Well, Amazon got so miffed by Macmillan’s proposal that it temporarily suspended sales of any new books published under its imprimatur, which includes such venerable labels as Farrar, Straus & Giroux; St. Martins Press; Henry Holt; Tor Books; and others. Macmillan responded by calling Amazon’s bluff, knowing full-well that Amazon’s decision to de-list the publisher’s capacious catalog ultimately would hurt the retailer’s bottom line more than it would help its cause of ebook pricing. With the door now open, other presses are jumping on the higher-priced ebook bandwagon.
This is a fraught issue, to be sure. As a frequent book buyer, I’m grateful to Amazon for doing its part to keep ebook prices low for as long as it could. The company clearly understands the psychology behind the pricing of digital goods. Consumers intuitively grasp that the marginal costs of producing any given copy of an ebook is next to nil, and so we’re understandably reluctant to buy up e-titles and expensive hardware when paper books can be had for a comparable enough price. On the other hand, I recognize that the promise of advances and royalties gives professional authors incentive to continue producing new work. Accordingly, they have a compelling interest in maximizing their return through healthy (read: inflated) prices.
We could go around and around all day about who’s right and who’s wrong here. As someone whose paycheck comes primarily from my work as a university professor and only secondarily from my publications, selfishly, I’m inclined to side with Amazon.com. But really there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys here. The whole situation reminds me of a recent dispute between physicians at my local hospital and a major health care provider, each of whom accused the other of excessive greed and bullying. In the end, the only party who suffered was the people who, for the duration of the quarrel, had to drive 50 miles to get the health care to which they were entitled.
Anyway, this may well be the first major conflict over the price tag for ebooks, but it’s surely not the first time the book industry has gone to war over book prices. This has happened at least a couple of times before, first in the late 19th century and then again in the 1920s/30s. In both instances, a bunch of young, brash publishers decided to slash their prices as a strategy to gain market share. Older, more established firms responded by digging in their heels and waging a clever PR campaign designed to convince the public that it was in their best interest to pay more than they actually needed to for books. (You can read more about this history in chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print and in volume III of John Tebbel’s magisterial A History of Book Publishing in the United States.)
What might these earlier price wars tell us about the present situation? Anyone looking to establish themselves as leaders in digital publishing would do well to undersell their competitors by offering electronic editions at or below the $9.99 price-point. The goal should be to sell as many copies as possible, by finding a price so attractive that no one can resist. It’s funny: we hear all the time about how book reading is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere. Could it be that the falloff is attributable not only to the usual scapegoats (electronic media, waning attention spans, etc.) but also and significantly to publishers’ greediness over book pricing, electronic or otherwise?
Indeed, if history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that publishers who’ve made their mark selling low can succeed in the long run. Just ask Simon & Schuster and Farrar & Rinehart (yes, that’s the same Farrar of Macmillan’s Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux). They were among the upstarts of the 1920s and 30s whose decision to sell books for a buck sent the old-timers into a tizzy.
On Wednesday of last week, Apple made the long-anticipated announcement about its new tablet computer, the iPad. Ever since then the media sphere has been abuzz with debate about the virtues and vices of the device.
As an avid iPod Touch user, I’ll admit to being rather intrigued by the iPad, despite the concerns many already have expressed about the latter’s lack of tinker-ability. I don’t want to dwell on that here, however. Instead, I want to focus on what Apple’s full-blown foray into the world of ebooks, via the iPad’s integration with the company’s new iBooks store, might portend for the future of books and reading.
Back in 2003 I published a piece in a fabulous online cultural studies journal called Culture Machine. (It’s edited by Professor Gary Hall of Coventry University, about whose Digitize This Book![University of MN Press, 2008] I cannot say enough positive things.) The essay was called “Book 2.0,” and it was a revised excerpt from the first chapter of my doctoral dissertation. In my book The Late Age of Print, I explore how ebooks have emerged in response to concerns about the ease with which printed books can circulate. “Book 2.0″ complements the narrative from Late Age. It explores how a persistent frustration with the material weightiness of printed books helped lead to the development of a variety of alternative book — eventually ebook — technologies over the course of several centuries.
When I was composing “Book 2.0,” there was, much like today, extraordinary optimism about the immediate prospects for ebooks. It was the heady days of the late 1990s/early 2000s, right before the dotcom bubble burst. At the time many people were claiming that we were in the midst of an ebook revolution. They pointed to a host of new devices — Rocket eBooks, SoftBooks, Everybooks, and more — as evidence of the upheaval. This was it: the moment when ebooks — finally, really — would stick.
Where are all of those “revolutionary” e-readers today? They’re nowhere to be found, except maybe in the odd collector’s corner over on eBay. Surely there are many reasons for their failure to launch, among them the economic downturn of the early 2000s. They were also pretty rudimentary, technologically speaking. But another reason for the lack of uptake, I’d contend, was the rampant proliferation of devices that happened to occur within a short period of time. Why would consumers want to trust making the leap into e-reading when they could not be sure of which reader or proprietary format would win out?
What the ebook mania of the early 2000s teaches us is that consumers get skittish when companies refuse to cooperate on interoperability and to engineer their devices accordingly. Rather than buying an e-reader and possibly getting burned down the road, book lovers want to see which one will win out in the end. Only the end never comes. Too many e-readers results a situation in which, rather than one or two rising to the top, they all just end up cannibalizing one another.
Life was relatively simple back in late 2007/early 2008, when the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader were pretty much the only kids on the ebook block. But today, again, we see a bunch of new ebook devices emerging on the scene — from the Barnes & Noble Nook to the Apple iPad, Alauratek Libre, Plastic Logic Que, Cybook Opus, and more. Now, I’m all for healthy competition in the ebook market. (Apple’s venture, for example, has pushed Amazon to improve its Kindle royalty structure.) Then again, if recent history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that these and other ebook developers need to figure out how to work together if indeed they really want e-reading to make it in the long term.
By the looks of things, 2009 is shaping up to be theyear for giving the gift of books…e-books, that is.
Take the Amazon Kindle, for instance. Amazon.com is touting the device on its homepage as its “#1 bestselling, #1 most wished for, and #1 most gifted [is that really a verb?] product.” Sales surely have been helped along by the catchy little advertisement for Kindle embedded above, which has been appearing regularly on TV stations throughout the United States since November. You may not know this, but the commercial is the result of a contest that Amazon sponsored last summer, asking customers to produce their own 30-second spots showcasing the e-reader.
Over at the other end of the post-Gutenberg galaxy, meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has already exhausted its supply of Nooks. Don’t despair, though. In lieu of an actual Nook, the bookseller is more than happy to ship a holiday-themed certificate to you and yours explaining that the “hottest gift of the season may be sold out, but with our elegant Nook holiday certificate you can still let loved ones know it’s coming.” Uh, yeah — on or about February 1st. Happy holidays from the Grinch.
Clearly, retailers like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are pinning their hopes for robust holiday sales significantly on digital devices, hoping that their customers will purchase not only the hardware but also an ample electronic library with which to fill it. The question, of course, is where are printed books in all this? Is all this holiday focus on digital reading yet another sign of the impending death of print — by which I mean not only of the technology itself, but also of the broader culture that surrounds it?
Hardly. What we’re bearing witness to, in fact, is the very culture that printed books long ago helped to introduce.
One of my favorite books is Stephen Nissenbaum’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated history, The Battle for Chritsmas(Vintage, 1997), which traces the origins of the modern commercial holiday. It used to be that Christmas was a raucous affair in which members of the lower castes of society were given temporary license to make unusual demands on social and economic elites. Often their requests were for food, drink, or money, and typically these “gifts” were given as a result of the implicit threat of violence. All that started to change in the 19th century, Nissenbaum shows, with the growth of industrial production and the gradual enfranchisement of the working class. Slowly but surely the social- and class-warfare that had defined the Christmas holiday was displaced onto parents and their children. And although the holiday mutated in significant ways and tensions defused, one thing remained pretty much the same: the promise of gifts was held out as compensation for the recipients’ continuing good behavior.
These gifts, however, typically weren’t perishables or cash tips. More likely there were items that had been purchased at stores. And among the first and most popular commercial goods to be given as Christmas presents were, according to Nissenbaum, printed books. Books played a starring role in helping to make Christmas over into the commercial holiday that people know and practice today.
Books may be going high-tech this holiday season, but that doesn’t mean, as some fear, that we’ve abandoned the cultural and economic habits they’ve helped to foster. Our Kindles and Nooks may appear to be pointing toward the digital future, yet if anything they channel the deep structures of our analog past.
I’ve been meaning to weigh in here on Barnes & Noble’s recent announcement about its new e-reader, Nook. It seems to be getting talked about everywhere, including this NPR story that I heard a few days ago. My bottom line is that, while I have not yet tried the device (it won’t be released until the end of November, just in time for the holidays), I am more optimistic about it and its capabilities compared to the Amazon Kindle.
It would be easy enough to point to Nook’s feature-ladenness as the reason behind my optimism. If nothing else it’s got a color screen, which sets it apart from that of Kindle. I’ve described the latter’s inexplicably well-touted e-ink display as reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, although I’m also taken with Nicholson Baker’s description of it in the New Yorker: “[T]he screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.” Nook also has touch screen capabilities; Kindle does not. While I’m not a proponent of touch simply for its own sake, I recognize tactility as a key experiential dimension of the handling of printed books. The touch screen thus makes for some nice experiential “carry-over” from the one (analog) reading platform to the other (digital).
But it’s not all about the interface. More important to me are Nook’s sharing functions and its — bear with me on this one — lack of a backup feature. The sharing function is straightforward enough: the device lets your friends borrow your e-titles for up to two weeks. Here’s what the Barnes & Noble website says:
You can share Nook to Nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.
Now, what the site neglects to mention is that publishers can opt-out of making their Nook books circulable. Nevertheless, I appreciate that even a limited type of sharing is the default position for the device and its content. Too much DRM does not a happy customer base make.
My delight at the lack of a backup feature clearly requires some explaining. One of the chief selling points of the Amazon Kindle is its so-called “backup” feature. I say “so called” because its not only about user-friendly content protection. The backup occurs on the Amazon server cloud, where intimate details about what, where, how, and for how long you read get archived, presumably forever. That’s great if your Kindle gets stolen or crashes, but it does open up all sorts of privacy concerns that I’ve been addressing lately in lectures at the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, and tomorrow at Georgetown University.
All that to say, it pleases me that Barnes & Noble isn’t following Amazon into the cloud. Indeed its decision not to go there, it seems to me, is indicative of the company’s sense of its own identity. However much Barnes & Noble may venture into other areas, such as printed book publishing and e-book readers, at the end of the day it still recognizes itself for what it’s always been: a bookseller. Amazon, on the other hand, presents itself as though it were a retailer, but in reality it is, in the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, “a technology company at its core.” (Advertising Age, June 1, 2005). The two company’s respective — indeed, quite divergent — approaches to client e-reader data reflect these differences in their core missions.
I may yet pre-order a Nook to go along with my Kindle. I’m still on the fence, but I’m leaning towards giving it a try. I’ll keep you posted, but until them I’d be interested in hearing how others are weighing in.
I’ve been racking my brain for the last several days trying to figure out what to post next here on The Late Age of Print. The problem isn’t there there’s a lack of material to write about. If anything, there’s almost too much of it. And the fact that there is so much reveals one simple truth about books today: however much they may be changing, they’re hardly a moribund medium.
Consider, for example, Wednesday’s debate in the New York Times, “Does the Brain Like E-books?” The forum brought together writers and academics from a variety of disciplines (English, Child Development, Religious Studies, Neuroscience), asking them to weigh in on the question. Most intriguing to me is Professor Alan Liu’s contribution, in which he distinguishes between “focal” and “peripheral” attention. E-books, it seems, dispose readers toward the latter type of engagement.
In some ways the distinction Liu draws harkens back to the difference between “intensive” and “extensive” reading. The intensivemode refers to the deep reading of a small amount of texts, often multiple times, while the extensive mode designates a more cursory type of engagement with a significantly larger amount of texts. The claim among book historians is that the coming of print ushered in a new age of extensive reading, which in turn set in motion a mindful, but ultimately thinner, relationship to books and other types of printed artifacts. Could it be that in emphasizing “peripheral” attention, e-books are not breaking with but rather carrying on the legacy ushered in by print?
Next, Fast Company reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair on Google’s latest big announcement. The search engine giant (it seems silly to even call the company that anymore) will be launching an online e-book store called Google Editions, beginning in early 2010. What’s great about the service is that the e-titles won’t be device-specific, as in those created for the Amazon Kindle. The initial launch will include a half-million e-books, and presumably more will be added as the months and years go by.
I’m still trying to determine whether the the texts that Google will make available via Editions will include those that the company has scanned for its Google Books project. If that’s the case, then talk about the privatization of a public resource — practically all of the volumes having been housed originally in public libraries! And even if that’s not the case, isn’t it strange that the company will essentially be subsidizing its book scanning efforts by hocking electronic texts published by the very same outfits who are suing them for scanning?
I’ve been raising similar concerns recently in my speech about the Amazon Kindle. The device automatically archives detailed, even intimate, information about what and more importantly how people read on the Amazon server cloud. This kind of information is subject not 4th Amendment/search warrant protections but can instead be subpoenaed by prosecutors who are anxious to dig up dirt on suspects. The question I raise in the speech, and the question that also seems to emerge in the case of Google Books and the coming Editions service, is, what happens to a society when privacy is no longer the default setting for reading?
Unlike bestselling writers, academic authors rarely get sent out on book tours. From time to time, however, we do have the good fortune of getting invited to speak to audiences in various parts of the country about our work. Case in point: I just returned from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I delivered the convocation address for the Campus Honors Program (CHP). This was the first in a series of speaking engagements that, so far, will take me to Iowa, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. A few more and I may print up a t-shirt.
The event at U of I was a blast. It began in the office of Professor Bruce Michelson, the director of the CHP. We chatted one-on-one for about an hour about literary history, the future of the book, religious publishing in the United States, and a host of other engaging topics. From there we adjourned to the Illini Union. I delivered my speech entitled “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read” — which focuses on electronic reading, liberal political culture, and privacy rights — to a lively group of about 60 undergraduate honor students. They peppered me with incisive questions about my stance on copyright, the future of public libraries in an age of ubiquitous bookselling, the implementation of a “right to read,” digital dossiers, and more. The group kept me on my toes, to be sure.
The title slide from my presentation, "The Abuses of Literacy"
The evening concluded with a lovely “meet the author” reception at Professor Michelson’s house. The CHP students had been given copies of The Late Age of Print over the summer, and so they came prepared ready to discuss Harry Potter, Oprah, the future of printed books, and even some material well beyond the scope of the book, including what I thought about online learning. What an edifying discussion it was — for me! The most memorable question? “What would I say to Oprah if I ever had the chance to meet her?” My favorite moment? When multiple students told me that they had found Late Age to be accessible and intellectually engaging — my use of the word “incunabula” notwithstanding.
Before the CHPers headed home for the night, they lined up for an impromptu book signing. Though I’ve inscribed a few books here and there, this was my first (and maybe my only) official book signing. It really made me feel special. Indeed, I was overwhelmed to see so many copies of Late Age – more than I’d ever seen gathered in any one place. And what made me feel even more special was the knowledge that the books had been placed in the hands of incredibly bright people who’d closely read and carefully considered what I had to say. What more could an author hope for?
My blogging has fallen off seriously in the last few weeks. This is due mainly to my finishing up an essay I’ve been working on called “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.” Well, it’s done now (at least a solid draft of it), and so I’m back to posting on The Late Age of Print. And in the spirit of the essay, I thought I’d say a few words about the “right to read.”
It’s an idea that, as far as I can tell, was introduced back in 1994 by law professor Jessica Litman, who published an essay in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal called “The Exclusive Right to Read.” Her piece was followed three years later by another one, a story by free software pioneer Richard Stallman, called “The Right to Read.” Law professor Julie Cohen gave the concept its fullest treatment in “The Right to Read Anonymously,” a marvelous work that she published in 1996 in the Connecticut Law Review.
The crux of the argument, articulated most clearly by Cohen, is this: “the content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.” Reading thus is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression; the one simply cannot exist without the other.
I’m rather taken with the idea of a right to read given the ways in which new e-book systems, such as the Amazon Kindle, tether reading to corporate custodians who in turn mine the machines for intimate details about how people read. As these devices become more prevalent, I worry about the effects they might have on how people practice and conceive of reading. Until now it was relatively difficult to monitor closely how and what people read. What will become of reading, and people’s relationship to it, once that freedom is definitively diminished? Indeed, a right to read seems to me of paramount importance in a context where someone is looking over your shoulder every time that you open an electronic book or periodical.
This of course begs the more difficult question, how should a right to read be implemented? Cohen’s work is brilliant in that it locates a right to read quite convincingly in the penumbra of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, deriving it from existing case law. The trouble with this approach, though, comes from the current mood of the U.S. court system. Jeffrey Toobin’s recent piece in the New Yorker, on the legal backlash against “judicial activism,” suggests that the courts as a whole — and the Supreme Court in particular — are for the most part unwilling to expand rights in precisely the way that Cohen is calling for.
So perhaps a right to read could be established legislatively — maybe even as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I like this approach in theory, but cannot imagine how it would ever happen in practice. After all, we’re talking about a Congress that passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act unanimously. This is also a Congress that listens closely to cultural producers such as Disney and lobbying groups like the MPAA, who in all likelihood would oppose a right to read on the grounds that it would force them to give up some measure of control over their intellectual properties (to which I would respond, “exactly!”).
Is there a third way? I sure hope so, and I suspect if there were it would have to begin at the grassroots. I’m thinking here of something like a counterpart to the Creative Commons, a nonprofit that gives cultural producers licensing options beyond the more traditional — and traditionally restrictive — terms of copyright. Would it be possible to begin architecting legal and digital rights similarly — that is, to allow people toread anonymously or at least under their own terms?
This is the question I’m left with having completed my piece on the Kindle, and indeed I believe it’s urgent that we respond to it. It’s a question that, if I’m right, the future of liberal societies may well hinge on.
My inner distribution nerd was thrilled to discover (via José Afonso Furtado) Michael Carins’ recent reflections on the death of the international standard book number, or ISBN, over on his blog PersonaNondata. The argument goes something like this. Over the last several years there has been a noticeable movement away from the ISBN, particularly in the case of e-books. Leading the way has been Amazon.com, which refuses to assign ISBNs to any of the Kindle books it sells. With book digitization there has also tended to follow dis-aggregation, or the chopping up of books into smaller, component parts that can be sold separately. How do you assign a single ISBN to what’s fast becoming an exploding whole?
Cairns clearly knows his stuff. As a former President of Bowker, he was chin-deep in the trenches of the recent effort to rework the ISBN for the 21st century. The result was the shift from a 10-digit to a 13-digit standard, which went into effect on January 1, 2007. My question is this: is the ISBN still necessary?
Anyone who’s read The Late Age of Print will know that I do not ask this question lightly. I devote the better part of Chapter 3 to the ISBN’s history, and to tell you the truth, in the process of doing the research I developed something of a crush on this smart little product code. Personally I’d be sad to see it go. But as an historian of technology it seems clear that the ISBN has just about exhausted its usefulness.
It’s important to bear in mind what computing and online communications looked like when the ISBN was first conceived, back in the late 1960s. Processing power was paltry by today’s standards. Broadband was barely an inkling of an idea. The ISBN was developed within the context of these technological constraints, as a concise and thus highly efficient way in which to convey extremely detailed information about the language, publisher, title, and edition of any given book.
Today computers are capable of processing much more complex data strings, which need not be limited to numerals or the occasional letter X. Furthermore, broadband has resulted in much faster electronic communications and consequently obviates the need to “keep it simple” and to the point (Twitter notwithstanding). In other words, the constraints under which the ISBN was created hardly apply today.
The ISBN was designed not only to facilitate “back-office” communications about books. It was also designed to facilitate their distribution. And in this respect Amazon’s move away from the ISBN with its Kindle editions is telling. Time and again the company has shown that it, and only it, wants to control the distribution of Kindle books. Indeed they are digitally rights managed so as to forestall their circulation beyond anyone besides the reader/customer/end-user/licensee (I’m not entirely sure what to call this person anymore). Amazon is moving us away from an era of more or less unfettered book circulation, and its slow abandonment of the ISBN is a manifestation of this.
It’s also worth remembering that the ISBN grew up at a time when the book industry showed perhaps its sharpest division of labor. There were authors, agents publishers, typesetters, printers, binders, distributors, booksellers, and certainly a whole host others all working in concert in disparate places on a single product. Now consider Amazon. With Kindle the company effectively becomes an extension of the publisher, typesetter, printer, and binder, all while acting as book distributor and seller. If Amazon has its way then we are likely to see a further breakdown in the book industry’s division of labor. What’s the point of an industry Esperanto when centralization is fast becoming the order of the day?
Incidentally, this is precisely why the answer to my question, “Is the ISBN still necessary?” is still a “yes,” despite all that I have had to say about historical contexts and the like. The ISBN was more than just a product code. It was an accomplishment — a testament to an industry’s ability to achieve unity despite the pressures of competition, corporatization, and globalization. Disturbingly, the waning of the ISBN signals the opposite trend: the growing hegemony of a single player who holds disproportionate sway over the industry as a whole.
Just a quick follow-up on the whole Amazon/1984 incident, about which you can read more by checking out my post, below. Yesterday Amazon.com Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the series of unfortunate events on the Kindle Community Forum, which is hosted on the company website. The statement reads:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com
Thanks and kudos for the stand-up move. And here’s hoping that Amazon never, ever repeats the mistake.
News broke over the weekend that Amazon.com decided to remove legally purchased but unlawfully licensed editions of books by George Orwell from the Kindles of some customers. The company did so without asking, although at least it had the good sense of sending an email explaining the action and of issuing refunds for the transactions.
Ever since, Kindle customers and technology watchers alike have been aghast at how Amazon essentially reached into the Kindles of unsuspecting Orwell fans and deleted what they had mistakenly believed to be their private property. Take Hugh D’Andre of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for instance, who wrote: “Can you imagine a brick-and-mortar bookstore chasing you home, entering your house, and pulling a book from your shelf after you paid good money for it?”
Others such as Jonathan Zittrain have rightly pointed out that you don’t actually own Kindle content. Instead you basically lease it from Amazon.com, who as the custodian of your Kindle controls most of the rights to that material in the end.
Amazon, for its part, has promised never, EVER to take such drastic action again — sort of. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices,” notes a company spokesperson, adding, “in these circumstances.” The devil, it seems, is in the details. Thus I am inclined to agree with Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing who states, “Amazon claims that they won’t do this again. But as every good novelist knows, ‘A gun on the mantlepiece in act one must go off by act three.’”
By now most everyone in the literary and tech worlds has chimed in on the scandal, and the consensus seems to be that Amazon overstepped its bounds. Clearly. But my question is this: why is anyone surprised at all by the company’s actions? Did anyone actually believe that Amazon would act in good faith toward its Kindle customers and their Kindles, when it has a direct portal into the inner lives of each and every one of their e-readers?
The problem stems from a fundamental misrecognition of what Amazon is. It started out as a bookseller, and with its recent foray into Kindle it’s continued to cultivate an air of bookishness. But indeed this is little more than an air. Despite what CEO Jeff Bezos and others might say, Amazon.com is totally and completely dispassionate about books. What it is passionate about is making money, and it will sell anything — from books to toilet paper to excess server capacity or warehouse space — to earn a buck.
What that means, then, is that Amazon does not subscribe to the liberal sensibilities with which book culture has long been associated. In other words, it holds little regard for the sanctity of property (other than its own), privacy, or free expression. For Amazon these are values only insofar as they can contribute to the company’s value stream. When they don’t, or when they prove too costly, those values are dispensed with algorithmically.
The other issue concerns the apparent irony that many of my fellow bloggers have already pointed out. Amazon didn’t just delete any old books from people’s Kindles. Among others it deleted George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984, which dramatizes life in a futuristic totalitarian state. The problem here, though, is that however “deliciously Orwellian” Amazon’s actions may seem, Amazon.com is not a state. It is a corporation, which is accountable not to “the people” but to its shareholders.
I understand the reasons for wanting to draw the comparison to 1984, but ultimately it’s an inappropriate one. As Daniel J. Solove points out in his wonderful book on privacy The Digital Person, the more apt literary reference in circumstances such as this may be to Kafka’s Trial, in which people are prosecuted without ever fully knowing what if anything they’ve done wrong.
ALA report:Perspectives from Library Community on Information Technology and 21st-Century Libraries http://bit.ly/cAMFDW Via @resourceshelf 7 hours ago
The price of content, by Brian O'Leary (@brianoleary) http://bit.ly/d7ik3b A function of value more than supply-chain decisions 7 hours ago
Fragmentation Is Inevitable, Even Good, By Marion Maneker |The Big Money http://bit.ly/aNx2qg7 hours ago
