Here’s something to entertain you, here in our Brave New World: with some question about the survival of Barnes & Noble, loyal B&N customers are beginning to wonder what will become of their Nook e-books if the company goes kaput?
Barnes & Noble has already deep-sixed the color version of the Nook, and some observers think, along with technology expert Jeff Kagan, that “the Nook may become the Betamax of e-books.”
Huh. Think of that.
Therein lies the reason this old troglodyte clings to her wallsful of real, paper-and-ink analogue books. Unless it’s a PDF that you’ve bought and downloaded into your computer and backed up externally, these e-book things are ephemeral, and you “own” them at someone else’s pleasure. Barnes & Noble selleth and Barnes & Noble taketh away. Ditto Amazon.
A hard-copy book can be eaten by crickets or printed on acidic paper that rots away… but by and large, once it’s bought, paid for, and parked on your bookshelf, no one can barge into your house and grab it away from you.
In the virtual world, however, Amazon can and does do exactly that, as we’ve known since 2009 when it yanked George Orwell’s 1984 off the Kindles of customers who had already paid for it and begun to read it. In 2012, Amazon deleted over 4,000 e-books when one of the largest distributors in the country declined to accept a change in terms of service, and then a little later that year it remotely wiped a customer’s Kindle, “accidentally” revealing that it can erase purchased and paid-for ebooks at will.
And because you don’t own those books at all — you own a license to look at them — all those hundreds and thousands of dollars worth property cannot be passed down to your heirs. If your whole collection of learning and knowledge exists in the form of e-books, you have no right to give them to your children and grandchildren.
Now, it has to be said that about 99.8% of published books could be disappeared without harming the course of humanity’s intellectual progress. But… The potential for censorship — we could call that thought control — is obvious.
And IMHO the potential for thought control already looms way too large in our electronified culture. This morning a member of our business group gave a presentation on the pervasive electronic surveillance the government has slapped on the entire country and probably on most of the rest of the world — how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and why it’s way too late to for anyone to do anything about it. It’s scary stuff.
Those of us who blithely fork over our privacy and our rights to corporations and secretive government agencies assume too much in imagining that these entities will always be benign.
So far, though, it’s not too late to buy a real book. Preferably with cash. 😉
Image: Selling the Nook. Tomwsulcer. Public Domain. Photographer warrants identifiable subject has consented to publication of image.
this already happened to me when Borders shut down – the books that I had bought through them, were “passed on” to another company, and I was sent an email saying “go create an account here and you can continue to get your books”.
That being said, the “nook” format of ebooks is epub – which is actually more common than the proprietary Amazon Kindle format. So if the nook hardware disappears, my books will work on kobo and other readers.
Also, books that I buy, and that get downloaded to my nook, also get copied to my hard drive and backed up – so if I lose access to my nook cloud – I still have my books. And my nook doesn’t connect to the internet unless I need it to – which is generally only very occasionally. This also saves on battery life!
Personally, so far I have compared all the Kindle versions, and my nook simple touch is still the best hardware ereader for my needs. If that changes in the future, well, I know there are ways to convert my existing epubs into whatever format my next ereader wants.
Interesting!
So it looks like readers should download each e-book to disk as they buy it. Can you do that with Kindle books at all?
I’ve heard a lot of people say they prefer the Nook. I hope it doesn’t go away.
What about the iPad? You can download a lot of different formats to the iPad — haven’t tried the Nook variant yet but so far no problem with Kindle and the stuff on iTunes. How do you like it as an e-reader, comparatively?
I haven’t tried pulling books off the kindle – but I know that using my kindle PC app I can pull the books down to my laptop – at which point they are *mine* and I can burn them onto a CD for backup.
I don’t *do* ipad (or i-anything, really) – but I did buy a tablet (a Nook HD+) a few weeks ago, when I found out they had a) opened them up to be true Android tablets and not locked down nook tablets and b) dropped the price down – $149 for a tablet, when I had a $50 gift card from Christmas. My tablet is a 9 inch one, but I wouldn’t use it as an e-reader – the battery life is nowhere near as good, and the tablet itself is *significantly* heavier than my nook reader. I guess maybe if I was stuck in the dark reading, I could use it 🙂 I have tried a couple of magazines on the tablet – and that isn’t bad, although honestly so far, I prefer paper magazines 🙂
Yes, I have a 9-inch i-pad, too. And it is a little on the heavy side. I went and made it heavier by getting this keyboard gadget that doubles as a cover. Not very practical for carrying in a purse! Trade-off is that the keyboard makes the device functional…IMHO those virtual key image thingies are almost useless and very off–putting.
Can’t complain about the battery life. It would be nice, though, if it would recharge from the car lighter socket — the gadget I got to do that lasted almost through two whole rechargings before it died.