23 Sep 2012
How to Make a Book Disappear

This perfectly elucidates my main objection to e-books - enabling a digital dark age.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces. There's no need of inciting mass cooperation in book-burning enterprises. No need for secret police or raids or extensive surveillance. The power to remove a book from a device, to remove all traces of it from retailers' websites, to expunge it from a publisher's online record: It would simplify the work of a would-be Soviet Union or Oceania multifold, would it not? It's ugly. For all kinds of reasons.

(link) [The Atlantic]

15:20 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link