• Farhad Manjoo looks at how Amazon can reach into its customers’ Kindle devices and delete books. ” The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here’s one way around this: Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.”  I think you all know where I stand on  this:  Amazon has shown, again and again, that it doesn’t care much about its customers’ rights.  None of this should be terribly surprising.

• At The Word Hoarder, Rich builds off my post on ads in ebooks, saying “Does the desire to place paid ads in book reflect a strategy to squeeze more dollars out of readers by making a substandard product the new norm (book with ads) and thus making a traditional book (no ads) the premium product?”  I think he’s right on here.  The hope is to create a “freemium” model (the buzz term of the moment in online circles, thanks in no small part to Chris Anderson’s book Free, which I mentioned last week) of books, where the casual fan can grab a book for little or no cost and have the cost of the book subsidized by advertising, while the hardcore book buyer will buy the ad-free “premium” version of the book for roughly what it costs now.  Lots of people I know, smart people, even, have said that this model is the future.  I remain a skeptic.

• Much has been made of this James Wolcott article on “cultural snobbery.” “Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits. They help brand our identities. At the rate technology is progressing, however, we may eventually be traipsing around culturally nude in an urban rain forest, androids seamlessly integrated with our devices.”  I think this same point has been made here and here, by the way.

All three of these stories point to something fundamental about ebooks and reading:  ebooks and online/electronic reading experiences are fundamentally changing how we view the act of reading.  Reading has always been among the most private activities.  Other than when we are very young or very old, we read our own books, alone, in isolation.  And then we take that solitary experience and carry it out into the world.  It occurs to me that having read a book and never discussed it is like having only half experiencing it.  It’s not real until I’ve hashed over it with others (usually my wife, the best reader I know).  I doubt I’m alone in this (ironically!).  This is sort of the reader’s equivalent to the realization at the end of Into the Wild:  “Happiness is only real when it’s shared.”

As I’ve said in the past, I think there are ways that ebooks and online reading can enhance our enjoyment of books, but as Manjoo, Rennicks and Wolcott show, there are also ways in which they threaten it.  The next ten years should be fascinating to watch if for no other reason than to see the way this issue plays out.  What do you think?  What excites you most about ebooks?  Is it the instant access and portability?  The ability to share and discuss titles in new ways?  What worries you most?  The control you’re giving up by going digital?  The expense of reading devices creating even more of a literacy gap between rich and poor?  Tell me in the comments.

Don’t.

This is more important than that, and now is the perfect time to think about whether you want to trust one company to dominate the book market, or any market, for that matter.  The benefit of having  a rich, diverse ecosystem of vendors and suppliers has never been more obvious:  many sources of information equals choice, and choice equals freedom.  It’s actually your freedom that’s at stake here, and putting things back the way they were, fixing the notorious “glitch,” won’t change that.  Because your freedom was at stake long before this recent de-listing experiment. Anytime you limit yourself to fewer suppliers, especially of something as vital as information (and if you purchase a Kindle, you’re effectively doing just that, limiting yourself to a single information provider), you’re putting yourself at the mercy of that provider.

And what kind of a provider is Amazon, anyway?  They’re not the most transparent of companies.  In fact, they’re among the least transparent.  They give jack to charity, they don’t pay state sales tax despite doing much business in every state, and they aim to be nothing less than the sole provider of media on the planet.

Do you want that much power in the hands of one company?  Even those among you who believe in the benevolent dictator model must be worried about this.  Think for a second about what Amazon did here.  In the world of ecommerce, the search is king.  Almost everybody who shops online visits a site to find a specific product.  By intentionally obscuring and manipulating the search results of your site, you are making a clear statement:  We don’t want you to read these books.  I can tell you from experience that if something is difficult to find through a search, it will not sell.  Not only was this a suspicious action on Amazon’s part, it had the potential to be very “successful” (ie, it would’ve greatly decreased the sales of those titles).

I know you think I’m overreacting.  You say, “So what?  They’ll list the books again, and surely they won’t be stupid enough to try something like this again.  After all, we caught them, didn’t we?”  True…this time.  My point still stands.  Concentration of power is a dangerous thing.  “But what if it was a hacker?”  I think the point still stands.  This is the proverbial putting of eggs in too few baskets.  I think independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: “I haven’t read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. Go IndieBound!”

It’s worth noting that Mesjak uses the word “monoculture” here, a word derived from agriculture.  It’s taken us some thirty years (since the passage of  Earl Butz’s “Get Big or Get Out” Farm Bill in the 1970s) to realize that having a few corporations control our food supply was a really bad idea.  What have we seen as a response to this?  A rise in small, local farms, increased urban farming efforts, and a locavore movement that allows people to opt out of a corporate food culture that is destroying our bodies, our country and our planet with alarming speed.  The small, local farm, something that was all but extinct ten years ago, is beginning to make a comeback, as communities realize the value of growing their own food.  As we see small, independent, locally-minded bookstores closing every day, ask yourself whether you want a future where certain books are unavailable to you because of corporate fiat or whether you want the freedom to choose.  It might cost you a dollar or two more, but isn’t it worth it?