The Kindle, Orwell, and the cloud
What Amazon’s remote erasing of George Orwell books means for the Kindle and our faith in cloud computing
Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos holds up a Kindle DX electronic book reader.
(Corbis/James Leynse)
Amazon has remotely erased books from customers’ Kindle readers before, said Farhad Manjoo in Slate, but when it sent George Orwell’s books down “the Kindle’s memory hole” last week, the totalitarian overtones were “too rich with irony to escape criticism.” If “BIg Brother” Amazon can make your book disappear, without your knowledge or permission, maybe “we know what the future of book banning looks like.”
It’s not just books, though, said Robert Wright in The Atlantic. The Orwell-Kindle incident shows the broader “perils of ‘cloud computing.’” Computer technology has had “naturally decentralizing effects on power” in places like China. But as we move our software and content from our own desktops to the “cloud,” and into the hands of Amazon or Apple or an authoritarian government, “maybe Orwell will have the last, bitterly ironic, laugh.”
Amazon’s apologizing for the incident, but they—and you—are thinking of the wrong “gaffe,” said Alan Wexelblat in Copyfight. The problem isn’t that Amazon pulled some pirated e-books, but that it sold the “stolen goods” in the first place and then couldn’t “manage to keep egg off their face” when they were caught. The Kindle could change how we read newspapers and textbooks, but who’s going to trust Amazon now?
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6 Comments
Posted by NM, Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 7:45 pm If you're at all familiar with the Kindle, this is ultimately a nonissue. By buying into the technology, you're buying into Amazon's ability to do things like this. Claiming that it's without your knowledge or permission is naive, at best.
Posted by bob dole, Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 9:09 pm Just because you know that it is part of the TOS doesn't make it a 'nonissue'. As Farhad points out, once everything is digital, how can you prevent the corporations that control the media distribution from changing the TOS whenever they want?
Posted by KPW, Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 9:25 pm One more reason to say If you have data you don't want to lose, you need a backup, or two. Offline is good in a different location is the best. Of course I don't know if it's even possible to back up a Kindle.
Posted by Tracie, Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 9:54 pm What I find alarming is that, back when I was in school the 70's, 1984 was required reading now, not only is it no longer required, the books have been quietly removed from our public school libraries at least in Floriduh. Rather a combination of Big Brother and Farenheit 451. I wonder if that is still to be found either?
Posted by Mike Licht, Saturday, July 25, 2009, 10:55 am Six months ago bloggers notably Stephanie at UrbZen warned about this kind of thing.See: notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/kindleseewetoldyouso/
Posted by Ryan, Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 10:51 am Simple solution, dont buy a Kindle.Don't buy any computer device where you are not primarily in control of what it is doing. Buy buying a Kindle you are helping make 1984 a reality.
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