Kindle and the case of the disappearance of 1984

With e-book reader Kindle something similar to what happened with iPods can happen: without being the best product of its characteristics on the market, and sometimes subjecting the user to arbitrary restrictions, I may end up winning by a landslide. Whether for a careful brand image or for the simple fact that due to its popularity it ends up seeming the only option. In fact, one can even think that this has already happened, at least in the United States of America.

Kindle

Photo by david sifry.

However, there are strong reasons to consider that perhaps Kindle is not the e-book model that should be hegemonic. The following lines are only intended to point out some of the whys.

The weak point of Kindle is that uses a file format to save the text of books called AZW that no one knows how it works, only Amazon. Which is truly worrying. Not only because it goes hand in hand with what has been called digital rights management, those computer instructions through which the publisher of a book can decide that it does not allow you to do things that, with a paper book, you could do. That is not the only problem. The fundamental problem is that Amazon can do whatever it wants with this format. You can put out a new schematic of this format so that readers entering the market will understand AZWs differently, so firstly you need to buy a new reader to read the new titles and secondly, there may come a time when your reader will not be able to understand the first AZW books that you bought, so you will never be able to access its content again.

There's a way around this, and it's easy: have Amazon publish how AZWs work so that if, at some point in the future, the Kindle stops knowing how to view a first-time type of AZW file, someone who wants to access its content, in In the worst case, you can always ask a computer application programmer to find solutions to the problem, based on the information published by Amazon. However, Amazon has not done such a thing, nor does it plan to do so: if you explain to the world how your files work, the world will know how digital rights management works and anyone can bypass the restrictions it imposes on readers. Those restrictions can mean (generally speaking, not Kindle specifically) preventing the user from copying the book to a friend, printing it, converting it to another format so they can read (for whatever reason) on a different device. to Kindle, etc. Even completely prevent access to the text if a week, fifteen days or a month have passed since the first time it was opened, among other things.

In this sense, the programmer Richard Stallman, initiator of FOSS, wrote in 1996 a brief dystopia, the right to read, in which some students find themselves in an ethical dilemma: they must decide if they help their classmates by allowing them access to useful information for their studies (with the danger of being punished for violating copyright laws) or choose to abide by the stifling law. One of the paragraphs goes like this:

There were ways around SPA [Software Protection Authority] and central license office checks, but they were also illegal. Dan had had a classmate from his programming class, Frank Martucci, get hold of an illegal debugger, and use it to bypass copyright control of books. But he told too many friends, and one of them reported him to the SPA in exchange for a reward (it was easy to tempt students with big debts to betray his friends). In 2047 Frank was in jail; but not by hacking, but by having a debugger.

These words may sound exaggerated and, of course, they are part of a fictional story. But from a story that, Through hyperbole, he tries to make the reader see the dangers of models as closed as the Kindle. And in fact, reality is not very far from what is told in the right to read.

Last week the following happened. In the catalog of electronic books that Amazon made available to its Kindle users, there were, among many others, 1984 y Rebelion on the farm by George Orwell. At one point, the company realized that it didn't really have the rights to sell it, so it removed them from the list of available books. At that very moment, the people who had bought those books saw how they also disappeared from their respective Kindles.

How is it possible? The reason is simple, at least from a legal point of view. The journalist Juan Varela explains it like this: «Digital books do not belong to you. You think they are yours, that you own them with their reading and the PVP. No. Publishers and digital bookstores actually rent them. "

And that's the second big problem with the Kindle model, which books, once purchased, are not owned by the buyer, but are licensed by the publishers and, of course, they set the terms as they see fit, reserving whatever prerogatives they see fit and granting the buyer very few rights. To comply with a regulatory framework with so many restrictions, there is no doubt that a control system is necessary, in which Amazon must know how you use your device (which is never entirely yours: it is above all yours) and makes you sign that you agree to such arbitrariness in the terms and conditions of the service. By the way, speaking of dystopias: that all this has happened with a book like 1984 it is still a funny irony.

The ideal would, of course, be to take advantage of the advantages of having books in electronic format without wasting efforts, as Amazon has been doing, in artificially promoting disadvantages and arbitrariness that they harm, after all, all those interested in the books being written, distributed and read as much as possible.

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  1.   Francisco said

    Actually Kindle is not that restrictive. It reads other formats, such as MOBI, and there is more than one program that converts almost any format to MOBI, such as Calibre. I have a Kindle 3 and what I have left over is reading.