Ethics - #3

To be completely honest, this isn't something I think of a great deal.  I grew up in a house where the amount of tapes we had (and still have,) would rival some video stores.  And the sad thing is, that's not an exaggeration.  Tapes upon tapes of store bought ones, like the Disney movies, or ones we recorded off TV when the tape was no longer available for purchase, or was too high a price to pay for a video.

One thing that I grew up with was when friends of the family would visit, if they saw a particular tape, my dad would offer to make a copy of it for them.  We had two VCR's hooked up, so all he needed was a blank tape.  The person would provide said tape, and my dad would make them a copy.  It ultimately saved a lot of time and effort, because in the days of tapes, when something was shown on TV like a movie or particular TV show, one wouldn't see it out on the shelves in video stores in three months, like we do today with DVD and Blu-ray.

I remember seeing the WARNING at the beginning of video tapes and one day asked my dad what it meant.  I don't remember his explanation, but however he worded it was enough to make me worry about us making copies of things for friends.  He told me no, that wasn't an issue.  It would be one if he was setting up something of his own movie theater and selling tickets to show a movie he'd recorded or bought, but what we did?  Nah.

With DVD's, I don't feel this same problem is cropping up as much.  DVD's, to my knowledge, were never given such widespread access to buying a machine that lets us copy the information from one DVD onto a blank one.  Undoubtedly, that info is out there, but to my knowledge it's not very widespread.  Of course, and I think as Blu-ray is becoming more popular, this is dwindling, but I know that there were machines that could transfer tapes to DVD.  In my opinion, this is a convenience.  How many people have home videos that they don't want to lose?  But as the technology for video tapes becomes more and more obsolete, (who remembers having to push the tracking buttons to try and get the lines off the screen?) people are losing the ability to actually watch their home videos, and sometimes those are memories one really doesn't want to lose.

However, I am aware of the other side.  People get the machine and a bunch of blank DVD's and decide to put all their tapes onto DVD and that way, they don't have to actually go out and buy the DVD.  That may work for some, but I think the general population is too curious about special features, bloopers, outtakes, and scenes added in, (not to mention the cover art,) to not buy the DVD.

All in all, perhaps I'm coming at this from an odd angle, considering how I grew up but, though they're connected, tapes/DVD's and books/eReaders are two different things.  And I'll continue with the eReaders and some unnerving things there.

"Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies attempt to control what you can and can't do with the media and hardware you've purchased."  As I've perused the website this quote is from, things have stuck out to me that I never knew about eReaders.  That many probably never knew, but if we thought about it, we could figure out.  How many of us go to Amazon.com and look up books, movies, or any number of other items?  If one scrolls to near the bottom of the page, you see a rectangle divided into two sections.  The right one gives recommendations of other books.  The left has one's history of recently viewed items.  There is no history on this page because I'm not signed into my amazon account, but if I was, it would have a history of books I've looked at over the past couple of weeks.  On the surface, that's a hooray! they kept track of the books I was looking at!  Because how many of us forget a title, but we can picture the cover?  If it's in our recent history, no problem, we can now write down the title.

Yet reader privacy is being compromised in this situation.  "Digital book providers have the potential to track, agregate, analyze, and disclose reader activity to an extent far beyond anything possible with physical books."  It more or less has the possibility of being a Big Brother looking over your shoulder kind of techno world.

I would never buy one personally, but I have to admit, on the surface, Nooks and Kindles seem to be a revolutionary item.  Imagine something roughly the size of a 5x* piece of paper, and no thicker than about twice the width of a cell phone, and it can carry hundreds, if not thousands of books.  For those of us who have books piled up everywhere, or bookshelves lining walls, or for ones who live in a place where a huge number of books is just unrealistic because of spacial issues, this is a wonderful piece of technology.  (My personal feeling is that I would much rather be holding the physical book.  The idea of pressing a button to turn a page, among other things, is just far too weird to me.)  Yet, there are some huge downsides.  When Amazon decided it would delete "George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers' Kindle e-book," people were rightfully outraged.  Apparently, one teacher lost not only the book, but "also the annotations he had been making for a class."

Soemthing like that is unacceptable.  If Amazon decides not to carry that book as a Kindle option anymore, they have every right to, but when customers pay for a book and it's on their device, only they should be able to choose whether it is deleted or not.  Bringing that into the physical world, it's as if a Barnes and Noble or Borders decided not to carry a book anymore, and went around to every person who had bought a copy from their store, and destroyed it.  No one would stand for that, and I feel the Kindle users who had this happen to them were right to file a class action lawsuit.

It seems the main use of DRM is to keep people from getting their hands on things in a way that is technically or blatantly illegal.  Yet here (and in his link, "even worse") we see that just because people are trying to keep track of e-books and follow what eReaders are doing, it doesn't mean that someone else can't just grab a book off his bookshelf and scan it in.

It also seems that the music industry went through a similar situation as the book industry is facing now.  Ultimately, the music industry gave up DRM.  "After insisting on dysfunctional copy protection for years, the music industry has finally realized that DRM doesn't work.  By making legitimately paid content harder to use than content downloaded for free, DRM punishes paying customers by locking up their content."  It goes onto say that "DRM is always circumvented eventually," which means it ultimately does nothing against piracy, and "the Kindle's DRM has already been cracked."

As far as physical books being given away or sold when the initial owner no longer wants them, this was never seen as a huge issue to my knowledge.  How often can a person go to a garage sale or flea market and see people with boxes of books they no longer want?  Now, selling something off an eReader would be harder, though technically, I guess someone could say 'give me two bucks, and I'll transfer my copy of this book to you,' or something like that.  We should hold to the same concept, though.  Just like how bookshelves can only hold a limited number of books, and theoretically, if someone wanted more, they'd have to get rid of ones first, (or just buy another shelf, but that kills my comparison,) one only has a limited number of books that a Kindle or nook will hold, so in order to buy more, either you shell out two hundred odd dollars for another device, or you get rid of books already on there that maybe the person doesn't want, didn't like, or doesn't really read.  If it was me, I'd hate to just delete them.  If you paid money for them, why just throw them away?  Why not find someone with a compatible device and see if they'd want it?  Donating, selling, or giving books away is always better than throwing them in the garbage.

I can't help feeling that this letter is ridiculous.  Twenty six circulations for a year?  And that's supposed to be enough for the popular books?  Who is he kidding?  The Harry Potter books, and nowadays even more, the Twilight books are read constantly by teenagers.  Not to mention adults who might be interested in either one.  He must be figuring that a person will keep the book the entire two weeks that it is loaned out for.  But that doesn't take into account people like a friend of mine.  She would go to the library constantly (still does,) to find new and interesting books.  She'd read them in about a day or two, take them back, and check out new ones.  That being said, I know there are more people like that in the world, so popular books like those could be checked out twenty-six times in the span of a couple months, not an entire year!  And what happens when those twenty six times are up?  The libraries have to pay again for another twenty-six usages, which uses up more money that especially libraries nowadays probably just don't have.  So what do they do?  They have to disappoint people by telling them that book isn't available through them for a device, and then the people get pissed, and either wind up just buying the book, or they go to another library to see if it's available through them.  Which would up that library's count for the twenty-six.

As I said, I have absolutely no interest in buying a Nook or Kindle.  I like holding a book in my hands too much.  Plus, we have what's actually called 'the book room' in our house.  I went in there on Memorial Day because a friend was over and he's interested in comics.  The book room is where most of my dad's comics are.  (Not only is he a collector, he's worked in comics since the seventies.)  Anyway, when we opened the door, it smelled like books.  How many people actually know what that smells like?  I don't even know how to describe it, but it's a smell you get that can only be experienced through being around a large number of (most of the time older) books.

I don't care how great the Kindle and Nook are, they will never give off that same smell.  And as I said, it's just too weird for me to have to push a button to turn a page.  Not to mention, what with all the warnings about identity theft and everything today, I wouldn't feel comfortable having my credit card permanently connected to a device, even in order to buy books.