Is Big Brother watching? Does Big Brother even care?!
Last weekend a fuss over a Kindle eBook was kicked up in quite ironic a fashion. There's no real need to go into details; you can read the initial uproar on Pogue's Posts and Techdirt. If you need any hints, think George Orwell's 1984 and deletion from users' Kindles.
It wasn't long before the true story emerged (ArsTechnica, New York Times), though. From a publisher's perspective, Amazon did exactly the right thing (also see this piece on Fast Company). When we at Canongate notice a rights infringement on the Amazon UK site, we immediately notify Amazon and the offending edition is removed from sale from their catalogue. What's different this time is Amazon is able to quite literally take the infringing books back - something we can't do with physical books once they've been sold.
(And this is another argument for the continued existence and superiority of the physical book. This drama proves that eBooks still have some way to go before becoming as ubiquitous as their dead tree contemporaries.)
And there's another difference that makes this issue of territoriality all the more complex - a student interviewed in the New York Times piece had extensively annotated his copy as part of his coursework, and all of that has now vanished. His work belongs to him, even though it's linked to the illegal version of 1984. He may have been refunded the $5 it cost to download the book to his Kindle, but how do we value his annotations and should he be refunded in some way?
Amazon should have considered what they would do with this annotations feature if they needed to flick what is known as the killswitch.
(P.S. iPhones have a killswitch, too. Don't take for granted that your Apps will always be there.)
