Big Brother Amazon

My good work buddy J and I have an ongoing feud with the administrative assistant in our office over the longevity of paper books. We maintain that digital ebook readers are the future and she holds on tightly to the past and all the glories of tree chopping, paper wasting books. And let me tell you, I thought it was the greatest when I got the Sony Ebook reader as a gift last year (mostly because I was running out of room on my book shelves)! But after the latest news from Amazon, I'm about ready to jump over to Admin's side of the disagreement!

Did you know that not only can you buy books with convenience on Amazon's Kindle, but Amazon can just take them right back whenever it wants?! According to a recent article on slate.com, Amazon reached into people's kindles and pulled out copies of (ironically) George Orwell's nineteen eighty-four and Animal Farm.

And that's not the only time that this has happened. There have been instances of Ayn Rand books and even some Harry Potter books disappearing after people have purchased them. They have offered excuses for why they had to remove them, citing copyright infringements etc, but what is to stop them from deciding in the future that some books just shouldn't be read?

Can we stand idly by to let this happen? No! Letting companies get away with small things like this while the rules for sharing and purchasing digital items are still being formed can lead to larger problems and loss of more freedoms in the future! But what can we do? I'm still working on figuring that out and I'm sure I'll get back to you when I do. One of the solutions is to not purchase items like the Kindle where companies like Amazon have shown that they don't really care about what their customers want.

As an owner of a Sony e-book reader I have not experienced problems like this but I have my own problems with their system. If you purchase a paper book, you are allowed to do whatever you want with it. You can loan it to your friends, you can sell it back to a used book store, heck you could set it on fire and burn it for heat if you want. Unfortunately, they make it very difficult to do any of that with the ebook reader (especially setting it on fire!). Sharing with your friends is one of the best parts about purchasing books and it's something I miss constantly with my ebook reader. But not being able to share is not the worst part! You'd think publishing digital books would ultimately be cheaper but I've found that a lot of the trashy mystery novels that I love to read are TWICE the price for the digital copies than they are in paperback! That seems just a little ridiculous to me, and more than once I've found myself at local bookshops purchasing books that I would have bought for my ebook reader.

The conclusion? Don't tell J or the Admin girl but I think I may be swaying back over to the paper side of things... I'm just going to have to invest in a bigger bookshelf I guess!