This month’s Philosophy Monthly by Julian Baggini has some interesting interviews: Ben Goldacre discussing his philosophical background, Michael Sandel on liberalism and… Jerry Fodor on Darwin. On that point, David Papineau has written a review of Fodor’s latest book (Word format).
British Library and Amazon to make available on DRM platform works paid for by the British taxpayer
Have a read of this announcement by the British Library: An historic new deal by the British Library and Amazon will make 65,000 largely out-of-print 19th century titles available for purchase via ‘print-on-demand’ service CreateSpace, which will be free to download from the Amazon Kindle.
Got that? 65,000 books that are out-of-print and out-of-copyright have been snapped up by Amazon and will be made available for purchase through print-on-demand or for free if you own an Amazon Kindle, a DRM-riddled ebook reader whose availability outside the United States has been an embarassing afterthought (you can’t buy the Kindle from Amazon.co.uk, only off Amazon.com and they don’t even have the decency to send you a UK power adapter - this led to The Guardian describing the move as: Amazon isn’t so much attacking the UK ebook market as permitting its Kindle to be used here
).
I’m sure some of us who don’t own a Kindle - which is to say the bulk of UK e-book device owners who instead have opted for DRM-free/DRM-optional readers like those built by Sony and Elonex - would rather like to read some of these books. I mean, the taxpayer rightly funds the British Library (through, the BL website informs me). Readers also fund the Library - both directly (through sponsorship, becoming a Friend of the Library) and indirectly (buying food and drink in the cafe and books and merchandise in the shop). We’ve paid for the works to be preserved, and now that funding is being turned against us. Amazon’s Kindle - need I remind you - not only has this DRM strategy, but a strategy that actually lets Amazon remotely remove books from your device, which they have used to claw back accidentally released copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. This led, of course, to obvious but amusing remarks about how your bookshelf can be remotely ransacked and suppressive books (i.e. those which don’t fit in with the current copyright regime) can be stuffed into the memory hole.
I don’t know why this is necessary. Why do we need the Amazon middle man to make digital copies of out-of-copyright works available?
Just imagine what the British Library could do if - a purely hypothetical scenario, you’ll agree - it were possible to scan books cheaply, run them through free, open-source optical character recognition and digitisation software and then make the resulting files available on some kind of universal, international digital network so readers could obtain them for no cost. If only the technology were available for that, eh? So much better to get people to pay for digitised, DRMed versions of their own cultural heritage.
I have rather a distaste for the word ‘fail’, but it is perfectly appropriate here: the British Library, by selling out our cultural heritage to Amazon’s DRM strategy, is failing in their commitment to make knowledge available to all, of “safeguarding history”, of “preserving, and ensuring access in perpetuity to, the UK’s national published archive”. It is ransacking history to puff up Amazon’s business model, shortchanging the public in the process and giving support to a technology that stands in ideological opposition to the very principle of open access to information that a library is supposed to uphold. And for what? A pat on the head from Mandleson? Some writeups in the press about how the library is “digitally engaged” (engaged to what? Being engaged is no achievement if you are engaged to a wife-batterer)? It’d be bad if this were just a marketing gimmick - a way to show that the library is digitally ‘with it’ - but it is so much worse: it undermines the very values libraries are supposed to uphold.
