Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. He’s the author of the forthcoming OUP book A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, look for it in September. On his website The Web of Language, Baron looks at Amazon’s actions over the weekend, pulling copies of George Orwell novels from Kindles. That post is reprinted here for our readers.
In a move worthy of George Orwell’s Big Brother, Amazon.com sent its thought police into Kindles everywhere to erase copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm.”
A few months ago, Amazon got into trouble with its customers for silently placing books about homosexuality in the “adult materials” category and removing their sales rankings. After a Twitter campaign under the rubric #amazonfail generated massive amounts of negative publicity, the bookseller reversed course, claiming that the problem resulted from a cataloging error, not a change in policy towards gays and lesbians.
Now, in a move that would seem to constitute not digital discrimination but electronic breaking and entering, they’ve done it again. After erasing the Orwells from Amazon’s popular and pricey Kindle e-book reader, the nation’s largest bookseller informed customers in a brief email that it was refunding their purchase price ($0.99 for each book) because the publisher had recalled the e-books. It later announced that the texts were actually pirated versions of the novels and had been made available by Amazon in error (legal versions of both e-books, copyrighted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, are still available from Amazon).
Amazingly enough, some Kindle users felt that Amazon’s actions were justified – after all, they confessed, they had received stolen property, and once Amazon had refunded their money, the company was surely within its rights to take back its property.
But others were outraged by Amazon’s arrogant big-brotherism (apparently the company has silently deleted bootleg Harry Potters and Ayn Rand novels from Kindles as well). One Kindler unhappy over Amazon’s invasion of privacy posed this hypothetical: What if Barnes & Noble sold you a book, but later, discovering that they sold it without the copyright owner’s permission, they broke into your house and took it back, leaving a refund on your kitchen table? Maybe not a plot worthy of Law and Order, but in most states, B&E’s still a felony.
Web 2.0 is a wonderful thing, permitting 2-way interaction between surfers and the websites they visit. Since it replaced the earlier, one-way internet, we’ve been living our online lives by downloading material from websites and uploading our own content in turn. The newest two-way superhighway is why Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia are so popular, and why a Minnesota woman was recently fined $1.92 million for illegal file sharing.
In the file sharing case, the RIAA took action against a woman that it considered a “copyright scofflaw” by hauling her into court, where she was defended by lawyers who are now appealing her fine. Amazon chose a more direct, less legalistic, route. Taking advantage of Web 2.0’s interactivity, it silently grabbed content from customers’ e-readers, despite the fact that they had purchased the texts in good faith and that the Kindle’s terms-of-service agreement “grants customers the right to keep a ‘permanent copy of the applicable digital content.’”
The Kindle story just broke, and with details still a little vague, we’ll have to wait for further developments to clarify the seriousness and legality of Amazon’s actions. But its significance is already clear. Between Amazon and the Google book project, two privately-owned, for-profit digital giants are poised to promote our literacy – to make books available to everyone, everywhere. But they’re also poised to control that literacy, limiting through their monopolistic influences exactly which books we can and cannot see. Amazon’s even gone so far as to pick our pockets to remove texts that they’ve decided we have no right to possess.
Yes, there are massive and indisputable benefits to the Web’s interactivity, but they come at a price, a reconfiguration of public and private space that is so dramatic as to be hard to miss, and yet sometimes so subtle that it’s easy for us to forget about. The internet allows us to go out into the world from the privacy of our desktops, to surf sites and to create them, to upload and to access information, in ways and at speeds never before possible. But our surfing also opens those private desktops to public view, by letting us publish our private thoughts, but also by creating a visible record of our keystrokes and our searches open not just to hackers and spies but also to retailers and advertisers who visit our hard drives, and sometimes, as Amazon has done, alter or remove their contents.
When the government reads our emails or tracks our web searches in the interests of national security, we cry big-brotherism and worry about the erosion of civil liberties. When corporations like Amazon and Google track us, ostensibly to better anticipate what we might want to buy, we tend to praise their ingenuity as hi-tech capitalism at its best. Amazon’s latest fail should remind us that Big Brother is watching not from the CIA’s bricks-and-mortar headquarters in Reston, but from corporate headquarters somewhere, everywhere, in cyberspace, and that we must defend our civil liberties from corporate as well as government abuse.
Aside from the pluses you mentioned, as I tell everyone these days, I get most of my news from Twitter...not just my normal NY Times view either, but from a range of viewpoints, not necessarily all that I'd agree with, but makes for good fodder for character building when working on a new piece of fiction (in addition to terrific stuff that we can use in our homeschooling).
I'm very new to Twitter, attempting to keep in touch with fans of my cartoons and gain new ones, but what I see for the most part is in fact the "just took a sip of Darjeeling tea" updates or the comments with links to programs that will inflate your number of followers. Bit silly I think.
I'm still trying to figure out if Twitter is the right vehicle for me to get my humor and art out to the world. I guess time will tell.
I don't totally disagree with your agent friend, it's just I don't agree where Twitter is concerned. While I believe texting plays into the dumbing down, because you're creating totally new words to make texting easier and thus some people (i.e. younger folks) may not always appreciate that you can't always write in that fashion.
But I think Twitter serves a greater purpose and that's mainstreaming information.
I love being able to access so many different pieces of information. I'd cut down on blog reading b/c it took too long to slog through blogrolls. But Twitter has made my blog reading more efficient.
But I see where some may disagree. Still, it's neither the second coming or the sign of the last days.
Sad to admit - my attention span and desire to read has definitely declined since the interwebs became such a big part of life...
I don't think that's the fault of technology, though. It's user error. Tech is a tool. In this case, it just happens to be one that can also be easily abused and overused. We have to find ways to make sure it serves us, not the other way around.
I agree with your agent friend on one point: I do feel that Twitter has helped increase my inability to focus.
But that's not really a fault of Twitter. It's the fault of Twitter gadgets like Twitterfox that fit snuggly into my browser window and pop up every time someone I follow makes a new tweet. If I could detach myself and turn off the Twitter gadgets, then maybe I wouldn't split my focus so often.
But I'm a big fan of what Twitter does and can do. I just need to figure out how to use it effectively for me.
Well put. As to whether twitter and its like are dumbing down the masses, as some argue, I have to disagree with that (and agree with you that it's not). Aside from your point that it takes consideration to limit one's words, language is in constant evolution. So all the complaints about new words created for texting and such strike me as a bit overblown, simply because we neither speak nor talk and we certainly don't spell the same way Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Chaucer did. Evolution of language keeps it vital; while there is some dumbing down as one might say, there's also the beauty and opportunity of creating something new.
And your agent friend hasn't seen any of the twitter poets, I take it?
(and yes, I couldn't live without twitter, either. I have one again.)
Hello Alice-Love your blog! I have a question and I hope with your experience in Children's literature that you my know of a book that I am trying to find. My dad used to read it to me when I was young in the early 80's. It was an ABC book that went like this "A is for Apple shiny and bright, B is for Bed where I sleep at night, C is for Carrot crunchy and yummy, D is for Doggy he lies on his tummy," and so on. When I have asked this question to others, they think that it is a Little Golden Book, but I have contacted someone with that book and it is not the correct one. My dad and I cannot remember the title of the book or author or even what it looks like. Wish I had more information. All I know are the words to the story, since we memorized it together and he taped me saying it when I was about 3 years old. I hope that you may know or have some inside resources that could find out what this mystery book's information is. Also, if it is a book that can no longer be found, can it be recreated or republished? Thank you for your time in reading this and I hope to hear from you soon. You can email me at [email protected] Thanks again!
Shaelyn
Everyone wants to declare the Death of the Book and blame it on something. I doubt that Twitter's any more to blame than the telephone, radio, TV, pool, comics, rock n' roll, cable TV, overdiagnosis of ADHD, the Internet in general, or the Bush administration.
I started teaching English at the beginning of the Internet revolution and noticed right away that my students with email accounts were better writers than those without. It's not hard to figure out why.
Between email, blogging, texting, tweeting, and facebooking more people are writing and writing more (by nearly any measure) than any other time in the 20th century. We are in a golden age for language (if not for books) and we ought to celebrate.
On the other hand, everything I've read makes Twitter look like either a fad or a religion (the difference: religions hang around longer). I'm not interested in either. If someone can demonstrate that it's a truly useful tool, and better than the ones we already have, I'll join in.