Are you buying steam?

In the July 2013 edition of Wired magazine, Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Law Professor and author of The Future of the Internet) warns of the danger of censorship now we are moving to the cloud. Zittrain is worried about the possibilities of 'censoring, erasing, altering or restricting access to books', and argues that digital texts are 'increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers or libraries.' He has a point. The provisionality of digital media - that is, the capability to change or edit an entire text instantly - and the cloud based storage that makes one version available for all to access but not to own in the physical sense, make it likely that the system could be abused. Purchasing and downloading a book for your e-reader, he warns, won't necessarily protect it from disappearing from the web, because unlike physical copies of books (or music), users only purchase a licence to read (or listen), not the entire work itself. Digital media is volatile, and is a likely to be withdrawn over copyright issues as it is prone to censorship.

So what is the future for digital text? Will there be a danger to our use e-books? Will we be put off by lack of protection of our purchases? Isn't purchasing an e-book a little like buying steam? Or is the next generation of readers already sold on the idea of digital only versions of books? They certainly save on physical storage space, but just how secure are they? How many will still subscribe to e-book purchasing if some of their texts disappear without warning, perhaps because an author has decided his work is flawed? What happens when a publisher discovers some books in their catalogue have been published erroneously, but are not yet in the public domain, and have to then withdraw them for legal reasons? The copy you have purchased will disappear from your Kindle. You bought the licence, not the book, remember? This actually happened in 2009, says Zittrain, when online retailer Amazon withdrew George Orwell's novel 1984 for that very reason.

Zittrain reserves most of his concerns about preserving the integrity of literature. What is to stop someone changing, adjusting or completely revising a text, when it is centralised and in digital format? he asks. He recommends that libraries could act as the arbiters of truth in this instance, monitoring and continually comparing their physical book stock against their digital counterparts to ensure no changes have illicitly taken place. That's a long shot though, and I wonder just how many libraries actually have the resources and staffing to be able to perform such a fastidious and time-intensive service?

I think the future of e-books is secure. Unlike some digital content, the e-reader isn't going to go away, and many millions worldwide have already subscribed to the concept. Opinion is still divided over which is preferable, reading from text or reading from a screen. Yet the biggest debate is probably yet to come - how to address the many legal, ethical and technical questions that remain about who owns the content you have purchased.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


Are you buying steam? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.