MacRaven - Dave Haxton's Weblog

Sun, 23 Sep 2012

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]

/Technology | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 9/23/2012 18:25:13
Woodrobin wrote

There are two huge flaws in this premise: 1. Offline backups: I have every book on my Kindle backed up to an external hard drive. I can read them offline, convert them to other formats, print them, etc. If Amazon pulls the book, I still have my backup copy, to which they have no access. 2. Bittorrent and other peer-to-peer distribution systems: Is it easier to curtail distribution of a physical copy of thousands of memos, or an e-copy bittorented by Wikileaks and downloaded by hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of countries, anonymously? If if takes me less than a full second to figure out the huge hole in the article's premise, how long did the author spend thinking about it before submitting, and how ignorant are the editors at the Atlantic? Pitiful.

On 9/23/2012 21:41:51
Dave H wrote

You know...

I have offline backups. In fact, I have a backup of the first program I ever sold. It was a bowling league scorekeeper for the Commodore 64, and according to the label was written in 1985. Unfortunately, I cannot read the disk, as I have no disk drive with the correct geometry, nor a working C64 to drive it. And even if I did, how long would the media itself last? I also have many movies in my collection, totally off line. Alas some of them are on Laser Disc from the early 90's, and my last remaining Pioneer disk play took a lightening hit earlier this year and is currently inoperative. I know a guy locally who has a supply of boards, so I think I can wing it for now, but when those boards run out ... With governments increasingly controlling networks, depending on storage like torrents or online clouds is looking more and more like asking for trouble. I haven't even scratched the surface of potential global natural disasters that can ( and someday undoubtedly will) effect access to digital media - solar storms, EMP weapons and even more exotic disasters could take the electric grid down for quite a whole, if not permanently. This is a problem interrelated to the one in the article. Perhaps I used a poor choice of words in saying it "elucidates" - perhaps "illuminates" would have been better. The problem the author describes is exacerbated by the ability of networks to control content - the author hasn't thought far enough ahead here and actually states that "Of course, it's impossible to wipe out altogether the digital record of a book's existence." Anything digital *can* be utterly destroyed over time. And they're a lot easier to destroy than actual physical, paper documents. I'm not sure there's a complete solution, but I am sure it's something we need to think about. Thanks for the comment and Be well, DAve H.

:: Categories ::

agriculture
asatru
copywrongs
humor
musings
politics
technology
index
haxton.org

:: Search ::

:: Blogroll ::

A Mindful Life
The Accidental Smallholder
Austro-Athenian Empire
Cauldron Born
Center for a Stateless Society
Dances with Ewes
Dispatches
egregores
Hardscrabble Creek
Honk & Helen
In Siberia
Laudator Temporis Acti
Lorrie's Livejournal
Masson's Blog
MyAppleMenu
NoNAIS
Notes on Religion
Numenous Thoughts
OrangeGuru
Overlawyered
Prophet or Madman
rogueclassicism
Sugar Mountain Farm
Thud Factor
Universe of Discourse
Wildhunt Blog
within the crainium

:: Archives ::

←September →
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

:: Site ::

Contact Me

MacRaven
Dave Haxton's Weblog
Musings, Reflections, Rants and Comments from a Hoosier Heathen husband, father, grandfather, farmer and software engineer. There's really only one of me ...

lunar phases

Unless otherwise noted, all original
work on this site is licensed under a

comment...


Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.

Name:
URL:	(optional)
Title:	(optional)
Comments:
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time