Amazon's bid for rights to sell secondhand ebooks adds another layer of complexity to a world where the certainties of print culture are dissolving
'It's a mess, this world of digital texts... Everything's changing. Nothing seems stable.' Photograph: Spencer Grant/Getty Images
"My brain," as one reader put it rather dramatically, "fell over at the thought of selling 'used' ebooks". He wasn't the only one. The reaction to the news earlier this year that Amazon had a patent to sell secondhand ebooks was almost universally strong: it could ruin authors' livelihoods, said some commenters. It was dangerous for publishers, said others. It's just boggling my mind, said most.
These are the details we have: the patent is for an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects", where "when the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user's personalised data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user's personalised data store". Amazon has not commented publicly about it, and it's possible that the book retailer may not be planning to do anything at all with the patent – that it was a defensive move.
But add it to the news last year that a Kindle user had her entire library wiped by Amazon without warning and the fact that, a few years ago, readers woke up to find that their digital copies of various books by George Orwell had vanished from their Kindles, and the possibility that ebooks could be sold as secondhand goods becomes another reminder of the sheer slipperiness – the intangibility – of the mushrooming digital product.
It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That's not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don't correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It's something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.
"I think it is a very grave problem," says Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian. "If you're citing a digital version of a book, often you can't cite the pages." He adds that that documents have always been slippery – "there's no definitive text of King Lear" – but the ease with which it is now possible to make changes to published ebooks means "you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in."
The issue is compounded, he says, "by the fact a lot of digital texts suffer from faulty editing, not to mention the hands of the scanners [appearing on pages]". He promises that the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, will "redo a lot of digitisation and make it right", as well as build in the capacity to make precise references.
"It is a mess, this world of digital texts," says Darnton. "We are living in a very fluid moment. Everything's changing. Nothing seems stable."
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These are the details we have: the patent is for an "electronic marketplace for used digital objects", where "when the user no longer desires to retain the right to access the now-used digital content, the user may move the used digital content to another user's personalised data store when permissible and the used digital content is deleted from the originating user's personalised data store". Amazon has not commented publicly about it, and it's possible that the book retailer may not be planning to do anything at all with the patent – that it was a defensive move.
But add it to the news last year that a Kindle user had her entire library wiped by Amazon without warning and the fact that, a few years ago, readers woke up to find that their digital copies of various books by George Orwell had vanished from their Kindles, and the possibility that ebooks could be sold as secondhand goods becomes another reminder of the sheer slipperiness – the intangibility – of the mushrooming digital product.
It used to be that a book was published, and that was it. Permanent, physical, tangible, it could be referred to for as long as the copy survived. That's not the case any more. We live in a world where page numbers – if they exist at all – don't correlate from device to device, where digital text can be updated at the touch of a button, where the ebooks we own can vanish without our say-so. It's something which is becoming a real issue, particularly for academics.
"I think it is a very grave problem," says Robert Darnton, scholar, author and Harvard University librarian. "If you're citing a digital version of a book, often you can't cite the pages." He adds that that documents have always been slippery – "there's no definitive text of King Lear" – but the ease with which it is now possible to make changes to published ebooks means "you take a problem like that, multiply it by 1,000, and that is the world we are in."
The issue is compounded, he says, "by the fact a lot of digital texts suffer from faulty editing, not to mention the hands of the scanners [appearing on pages]". He promises that the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, will "redo a lot of digitisation and make it right", as well as build in the capacity to make precise references.
"It is a mess, this world of digital texts," says Darnton. "We are living in a very fluid moment. Everything's changing. Nothing seems stable."
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