When you go on Amazon (as you invariably would), select an e-book and click ‘buy’, you may think that this is just what you’re doing. However, consumers are coming increasingly to acknowledge that, as far as much of their digital media library is concerned, their costly purchases are rather mere rentals, and their ownership rights extend little beyond those of a tenant farmer over his land.
Last month Amazon blocked a Kindle account belonging to Norwegian Linn Jordet Nygaard, preventing her access to a collection of almost fifty electronic texts. Only after a public outcry was an embarrassed Amazon forced to reinstate her account, though they’ve yet to comment on the case. Now this may be because their position is indefensible. More likely though it is because they know that they didn’t put a foot wrong legally – their position is one of unsettling power, the full extent of which they would rather have their public oblivious to. Unbeknownst to many, the purchase of an e-book is actually in many cases only the purchase of a licence to read, a licence that can be revoked without notice subject to the legal scraps lodged in the thicket of terms and conditions that, obviously, no one ever reads.
Proprietary software often ties the e-book to a particular device or reader. Readers are also physically prevented from transferring content to friends and immediate family, or between devices, by encryption software called Digital Rights Management, devised to protect a creator’s copyright from piracy and prevent buyers from on-selling the digital file for profit. This ringfencing makes it all the more simple for distributors to destroy the entire edition of a particular text, to deprive customers of the content they have paid for. Not that this is offensively frequent an occurrence – the Nygaard case demonstrates how detrimental these circumstances can be for a distributor’s reputation – but it is by no means unheard of either. In July 2009, Amazon was forced to efface copies of two of George Orwell’s cult novels – ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ – from hundreds of e-readers after it emerged that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company without appropriate rights to them. And that was that. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
For some, the removal of the e-book from their device also entailed the deletion of annotations, bookmarks and critical notes. The main reason it irked however was in its dose of sobering reality – much of the digital content we consider to be our own is in fact far from it.
The often aggressive behaviour of e-book providers however surprises me. It’s odd that in a market which will thrive or flounder on the strength of its winning over of sceptical bibliophiles – those with allegiances to books as palpable, bendable, vulnerable things – publishers and distributors aren’t doing everything in their power to promote the tangibility of digital texts. Lack of transparency and leniency as regards Digital Rights Management is making digital media seem disastrously will-o’-the-wisp.
