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Originally Posted by Alan Kaufman
What matter how all this occurs, either by way of brownshirt, KGB or corporate moves. All end up in the same result: the shutting down of bookstores, the death of books, the death of privacy, the oipening of ourselves to totalitarian monitoring, the reliquishing of our freedom.
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Death of PUBLISHING. Not of BOOKS.
Books are not the paper they're printed on... if they were, copyright law would be nearly meaningless; we'd have no rules against derivatives, unauthorized audio or digital versions.
Death of privacy? Only for those who accept it. Technology is not synonymous with lack of privacy, and those who fight against the corporate invasion into our private lives are--surprise!--those who understand and use technology, not those who fear it.
Monitoring? Nobody monitors what I read. I draw my sources from several different computers, several different sites on those computers; there's no central repository what I have read, what I will read, nor access to my archives (plural) of stored material.
However, my pbooks are mostly in a single storage locker, where anyone with a single search warrant could get a complete reckoning of them, and a single match could destroy them all.
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So many have sought to explain away the Orwell incident with Kindle.
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My explanation: Amazon broke the law, and rather than 'fess up and pay for it, they punished their customers. The fact that they can do this, is part of why I don't have a Kindle.
You've failed to explain how your anti-ebook rant applies to non-wifi ebook readers.
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They've pointed to the legal issues, etc. Virtually everyone has miissed the main points: that it happened at all and that the books deleted from Kindle were 1984 and Animal Farm.
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And before that, a cluster of Ayn Rand's books, and the Harry Potter books. 1984 wasn't the first book Amazon had remote-deleted from Kindle; it was just the one that got attention. (Also, it was perhaps the first one that *Amazon* was completely at fault for: they created a feed from one of their affiliate sites, and ignored their own geographic restrictions.)
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The number of bookstores that have closed. The fact that everywhere you look people are hunched frowning over screens. That people are talking to others on cell phones while ignoring those around them. That people are whipping out devices to check their messages constantly.
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Yes. We get that. Why is that *bad*? Why does it matter whether people get their informative & entertaining content from a screen or from paper? Both are technological devices that require great industry to support them.
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And lastly, ask yourself: what right do these people at Amazon and Google have to come in as they have and decimate one of the most precious areas of human life: the book and book culture?
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Publishing, and publishing culture. Paper fetishists.
Books are doing fine, and spreading to people who never previously had access to them.