E-books: Open to government control?

Might that Amazon Kindle in your hand be a threat to your freedom? said Husna Haq in CSMonitor.com. That’s what Jonathan Franzen, the acclaimed author of The Corrections and Freedom, suggested at a book festival last week. Sounding a “battle cry against e-readers,” the best-selling novelist railed against digital books, saying they’re “not for serious readers” and that their impermanence might even open the door to Orwellian censorship. If books are on e-readers and not on paper, he said, their texts can be changed or deleted by some central authority—a situation “not compatible with responsible self-government.” It may sound paranoid, said E.D. Kain in Forbes​.com, but Franzen has a point. To ban or burn books, authoritarian governments have to hunt down every copy. But a digital text originating from some external source “simply has to be turned off.” Without ink on paper, it’s that much easier to make “Ray Bradbury’s nightmare” a reality.

What a load of pseudo-intellectual “piffle,” said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. What’s more permanent than open-source digital texts shared between millions of readers? “Hanging out in some iCloud somewhere, the e-book will be eternal,” while dead-tree books will go out of print, then rot and decay. As for the threat to democracy, said Tom Chivers in Telegraph.co.uk, what does Franzen think, that governments will “weave political messages subtly into the text of Jane Eyre?” Clearly, Franzen prefers paperbacks to e-books, but can’t come out and admit to being a Luddite crank. So he’s disguised his retrograde hissy-fit as a grave, sociopolitical warning.

Franzen may be old-fashioned, said Ben Boychuk in Newsday.com, but his worries aren’t totally misplaced. E-booksellers can exert surprising control over digital content. A few years back, Kindle owners who had bought Animal Farm discovered it had vanished when Amazon ran into a copyright problem and yanked the book back. Who’s to say whether “some other extraordinary circumstance” might cause other e-books to mysteriously disappear? It wouldn’t be that extraordinary, said Tom Sutcliffe in the London Independent. Take a look at the small print next time you buy an e-book. It’s licensed, not sold to you—meaning it can’t be lent, resold, or passed on to an heir when you die. For convenience, an e-reader is great. But if you want to own a book, you’d better buy the dead-tree edition.

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