Urbzen

A few months ago, I posted here about the dangers I saw in the Amazon Kindle and the rise of digital publishing—namely that as we move our books and other media from a printed to a digital format, we increase the odds that they can be altered or even deleted without our consent and possibly without our knowledge.

It’s a bit of a paranoid thesis, but I think it moved closer to reality today when it was revealed that Amazon had “reclassified” a whole slew of books dealing with LGBT issues—from gay romances to academic works on the impact of homophobia to Heather has Two Mommies—as “adult” and thus removing them from some searches, sales rankings and bestseller lists on Amazon.com.

That Amazon chose to reclassify books with any sort of gay theme—be it academic, literary, or journalistic—but not those with much more explicit heterosexual content is blatantly homophobic and certainly worthy of discussion. But what I’m more concerned about is the creeping corporate control over the flow of information and ideas.

In a world of printed media, the consumer holds at least some of the power. Once a book is disseminated into bookstores, libraries and homes, it’s a herculean if not impossible task for a single entity—the executive suite at Amazon, say—to move, reclassify, alter or censor it in one fell swoop. As we’ve seen from Amazon, though, in a digital world, titles can be removed wholesale from searches, rankings, etc. quietly and overnight.

Given that, it’s not too big of a stretch to imagine a day when a handful of big-name sites like Amazon dominate the distribution of literature—on devices like the Kindle, they already do. Say these companies, for whatever reason, decide that a particular title—a political manifesto, maybe, or a book on radical Islam—isn’t “suitable” for their audience. What’s to stop them from quietly removing the offending title from search results, from rankings, or just taking it down altogether?

Of course, it’s always been up to retailers to decide which books to sell and which not to sell. But the digitization of books gives way to an unprecedented centralization; Instead of hundreds of thousands of bricks and mortar booksellers in America, there might be maybe three or four online outlets. Do we really want to trust to the discretion of a handful of corporations that kind of power over the flow of information?

It’s important to note that Amazon never announced this change. Much like the Facebook TOS changes that caused such a stir back in February, they just… did it. Quietly. So that a book that would have shown up in your search results on Friday would have been absent on Monday. No announcement, no opt-in, no empty space on the bookshelf, almost like it was never there.

Everyone’s abuzz about the Kindle, Amazon’s handheld reading device that lets users read “what you want, when you want it” by getting books, magazines and newspapers delivered wirelessly in less than 60 seconds. The second incarnation of the Kindle, released today, weights 10.2 ounces and can hold more than 1,500 books. “No longer pick and choose which books fit in your carry-on,” the Amazon site exclaims. “Now you have your entire library with you.”

Not so fast. Leaving aside for a moment that the Kindle’s very name is weirdly evocative of book burning, consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle—convenience, selection, immediacy—we’re losing something too. The printed word—physically printed, on paper, in a book—might be heavy, clumsy or out of date, but it also provides a level of permanence and privacy that no digital device will ever be able to match.

In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

Consider what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format. The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon—to buy another book, pay a bill, whatever—will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book.

Of course, just because a book is printed doesn’t mean it’s safe from government scrutiny. But I know for certain that the copy of Lolita I have on my bookshelf contains exactly the same text now as it did when I bought it from a used book store five years ago, and I’m the only one who knows I have it. Well, and now the entire internet. But you see my point.

I hope this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination. But in an age of no-knock warrants, warrantless wiretaps and national security letters, it’s not too much of a leap to believe that the sanctity of the written word doesn’t matter as much to our leaders as we’d like, and that to move toward exclusively  digital distribution of ideas puts the core of that freedom at unnecessary and unacceptable risk.