Yule Heibel's Library tagged kindle →  View Popular, Search in Google

Some of this I'm inclined to disagree with, but the overall gist - that, if we care, we need to control our own "memory theaters" and not rely on outsourcing them to the cloud or to various "hamster cages" - I can't disagree with.
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Until these companies take seriously the needs and, above all, the rights of readers (the human beings, not the machines), they deserve ruthless suspicion. Just because the Kindle and iPad might seem to work relatively reliably now, and because Google tells itself “don’t be evil,” we shouldn’t keep from entertaining darker, more paranoid, even Orwellian fantasies. Never before has the technology been so good for totalitarian urges, should they arise. Already, the agreements being hammered out between Google and the publishing industry are likely to allow Google to withhold as much as 15% of its scanned, copyrighted archive from the public. It’s unlikely that anyone will bother (or pay) to scan most of those books again. Whoever controls Google Books already controls the future of public knowledge to a very considerable degree.

Far from its pleasantly chaotic salad days, the internet is now tending toward mass consolidation. Companies are less and less interested in helping us store information ourselves and more and more eager to do it for us. We’re not keeping our email and documents on our computers’ hard drives anymore; Gmail and Google Docs have them on distant servers. Apple wants to follow suit with its subscription-based MobileMe system, pulling more and more of our data into its so-called “cloud.” Facebook has already done so with no less than our friendships.
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nathan_schneider memory_theater kindle e-books identity

This is a very important article by Ted Striphas about a serious issue. Among its many points, consider this:
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Also troubling is the potential of e-readers like Kindle to render users vulnerable to new levels of government surveillance. Library loan records and bookstore sales receipts are well-established mainstays of criminal investigations. The assumption is that evidence of what a suspect has been reading may ultimately help investigators to establish a pattern of behavior leading up to a crime. In such cases, the police only have to acquire a subpoena to access the information they need. But if the same investigators wanted to sift through a suspect’s own library of printed books for evidence of how she or he had been reading, that would be a different matter. A 4th Amendment “probable cause” standard would apply, meaning that investigators would have to go through the motions of obtaining a search warrant from a neutral magistrate. The standard increases because of the heightened privacy expectation that surrounds our reading activities.

Tethered appliances like Kindle run afoul of this heightened privacy expectation. Amazon, for its part, possesses detailed records of not only what but also how Kindle users read. And because the data is transmitted electronically and then archived in the company’s computer cloud, US law doesn’t consider it to be private information. It belongs instead to an exceptional category, something called “stored communications.” These types of exchanges exceed the scope of the 4th Amendment, because they’re shared with and maintained by a third party. The upshot is that the reading activities of Kindle owners suspected of crimes aren’t subject to the usual probable cause/warrant standard but instead to the more relaxed requirements of obtaining a subpoena. And as is typical of tethered appliances, Kindle has been engineered so that users have practically no choice but to allow their civil liberties to be undermined in this way.
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About author/ article:
Ted S

kindle amazon e-books freedom free_expression law ted_striphas

I've used Scribd for a while now - great service. This NYTimes article describes how it's moving into becoming a platform for e-publishing with a business model for authors/ publishers. Also meant as a diversification / challenge to Amazon's Kindle, and to Google.

scribd online_book online_publishing business_model e-books nyt kindle