Book Love

I love books. I may not read as much as I used to or should or wish I did, but I can't pass a bookstore without thinking of stopping in, particularly an independent or used book store. My latest love is the legendary Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. My latest skepticism is Amazon's Kindle.

While a used paperback can cost a couple bucks, you need to spend three hundred bucks to buy this electronic book device, the Kindle, and then pay more money for the actual books. And while it may add in convenience, it's not the reflective light-on-paper experience, it's pixels jetting at your eyes, an entirely different brain stimulation. Sure, you can load it up and it's lighter than the same number of novels, but it's not the same level of affection or attachment one has for a tome.

And even worse, you can buy an e-"book" for your Kindle, then have Amazon remove it without your knowledge or consent:

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Appropriately enough, these were works by George Orwell, who invented the concept of the "memory hole" where the past is deleted by a totalitarian government in his classic dystopian tale, 1984.

So what happens when there's another 9/11 and, under massive political and social pressure, Amazon chooses to delete books found offensive to current society? Or what if some form of the intrusive Patriot Act leads to wireless auditing of your Kindle for seditious material?

Or what happens if a magnetic wave hits and the juice runs out?

I miss the daily newspaper in it's old form but I'm not as emotionally attached, in part because the massive amount of (wasted) paper it traditionally consumes seems obscene in these eco-scarcity conscious times. But books?

If it's on a Kindle, maybe it shouldn't be called a book anymore. Maybe it needs a new name.

How about: "data."