Digital Book Burning

I was toying with the idea of buying a Kindle recently and decided against it at the moment, mostly for reasons of cost. But I can see advantages to the electronic readers. That was until I read this. I hadn’t realised that Amazon have the technical capabilities of deleting your bookshelf. Am I the last one to learn this?

Maybe this was huge news earlier in the year and I missed it, but is certainly worth highlighting again.

As our media libraries get converted to 1’s and 0’s, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren’t really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider.

Now Amazon says it won’t do it again. That’s good, so far as it goes.

image from here.