#1111 Brother Kindle

I’m a big reader. But I’ve resisted getting a Kindle. Part of me is really impressed by it. The screen is very easy on the eye, and I like the idea of its size. It’s portable enough to take into every room of the house.
Some rooms are a little cramped for laptops.
I also like the fact that you can download a new book from just about anywhere. Plus, your Kindle can hold up to a thousand books or something, and even more in the permanent web-based storage space.
But there’s where I worry. I actually like having a library full of books. I like simply owning the book. And with Amazon’s Kindle, you don’t.
Recently their customers found that out when Amazon remotely reached into everyone’s Kindle and deleted a copyright-violating version of a book. And they did so without warning.
Some kid who was working on a paper, and lost all his notes and annotations, is suing for damages. (You can use Kindle to annotate by the way.) He didn’t know Kindle had let a copyright-violating version through. He just paid his 9.99 and started annotating.
But Kindle kindled up a fire of paranoia in a conspiracy-minded person like me. If you don’t really own the books, what’s to keep them from taking all of them away? What if they decide to be the playground cyber-bully and take their ball home when they don’t want to play anymore?
Or worse, what if we all get enslaved to the various e-books and all knowledge is stored on those book computers? And then some unscrupulous demagogue takes over and wipes out human knowledge.
Our cultural history is currently protected from fire and calamity by being stored in separate houses and libraries all over the country. If we centralize that, can’t Big Brother take it over?
The title of the book they pulled off people’s Kindles was, ironically enough, 1984.
Then again, Kindle does let you instantaneously access and use a dictionary just by highlighting a word. And that does save the effort of having to get up and use Google...
Let’s see, laziness or protecting all human knowledge...?
What the heck, Kindle it is.
America, ya gotta love it.