Amazon did its best impersonation of Big Brother last week, when it reached into Kindles the world over and remotely deleted copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Witty title writers thanked their lucky stars and began stamping out stories comparing Amazon to the Ministry of Truth. Once again, the Twitterati mercilessly mocked Amazon. Double-Plus Outrage ensued.
And rightly so. Amazon’s possession of a limitless digital flamethrower is generally creepy. But I think we are ignoring the scariest part of this technology. Amazon used its power to delete entire volumes, a tactic with all the subtlety of carpet bombing. But this technology could be used like a sniper rifle, replacing small portions of an offending work and leaving the reader none the wiser. This use is infinitely more terrifying.
Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Pretend you are a celebrity or a politician or the head of global corporation or just a generally important entity. And let's say you’ve been offended or embarrassed or defamed in part of a written work. Maybe a paragraph describing your marital indiscretions, maybe a picture showing your polluting ways. You are thinking of suing. And you don’t want the publisher’s money, you just want the offending material to disappear.
In that scenario, do you think that you would ask for the elimination of the entire work? Of course not. That would attract even more attention to your villainy. Instead, you craft a settlement where the old version of the work is “corrected.” The publisher agrees to remotely delete the offending sentence and upload a sanitized work.
Don’t think this can’t happen. In fact, I’m willing to bet most of us would willingly open our doors to the sanitation squad: “Why buy a new edition of a book your already own? BookUpdate™ automatically syncs your version with the publisher’s latest release, correcting formatting and factual errors while you sleep! Ignorance is strength! Freedom is Slavery!”
Terrifying. And who would notice a missing word here or there? Covertly editing content is a great way to obviate controversy.
If the publishers really wanted to do this whole truth-assassination enterprise right, they would bury a list of their corrections in the small fonts usually reserved for terms of service. “Thank you for using BookUpdate™. In this update we corrected (impossibly small text) inaccuracies in the following pages . . . ."
Why is this so scary? Because it makes censorship costless. Remember that humiliating publicity is the only thing even mildly restraining the remote deletion craze. Amazon has previously deleted books. It was only shamed into changing when it chose to disappear a book whose main subject is the obscenity of a world that makes information (and the individual) disappear. (I can only imagine how disappointed Ray Bradbury is that Farenheit 451 was not also digitally charred.) But when a publisher can mutilate content subtly, the whole threat of Internet hordes goes down the memory hole.
Of course, as newspapers and magazines migrate to devices like the Kindle,* the ability to remotely delete with precision will become all the more valuable to the friends of dictators, plutocrats, and the leaders of IngSoc. Orwell would appreciate the perversity: a world where plaintiffs want silent, subtle retractions and books slowly burn while on our very shelves.
(Andrew Moshirnia is a rising second-year law student at Harvard Law School and a CMLP legal intern. Coincidentally, he loves his big brother.)
* Remote deletion is not limited to print materials. See the court-ordered remote deletion of digital "I Can't Believe It's Not Tivo" content.
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You allude to it, but the A+
You allude to it, but the A+ #1 guaranteed way that remote editing of books will happen--and quietly become accepted--is through textbooks. I worked in marketing at Houghton Mifflin's College Division for a couple years, and there was nothing more demoralizing to us than when there was an error in a textbook. Errors waste time and money, tick off sales reps, and diminish the publisher's brand in the eyes of professors using our books. If textbooks become common on Kindles or similar future e-readers, everyone--publishers, profs, and students--will want errors corrected quickly and invisibly. I'm not sure that they would later differentiate morally between textbooks and other publications.
Of course then someone at Berkman will get a $100,000 grant to write code that every six months compares textbooks against prior versions to find edits.
Textbooks: Remote- Yes, Covert- Not sure
Andrew,
As to the issue of consumer acceptance and publishers, I honestly feel that "Will consumers accept this?" is not a question that publishers will ask when remote editing comes around. Instead "How much can we charge for this?" will be the bigger speedbump. Textbook publishers hate mistakes but I don't think that is the only reason for promiscuity when it comes to publishing new editions. By having several editions, publishers can limit the market for reselling and capture more profit. Anyone looking for obscenely cheap textbooks need only look for the older editions floating around ABEbooks.com. These books are worthless because new versions have rendered them obsolete.
While it's true that Kindle editions would be locked and non-transferrable, which would prevent the resale market from even existing (and this is a whole other level of unjust), I feel like the publishers will still want to charge for a version update.
So, to sum up, I agree with you that textbooks publishers could help drive remote editing. I'm just curious how they would feel about doing so "invisibly." I think that they would want to charge for the privilege.
Examples from newspapers
This is a huge problem already for scholars who work with or cite newspapers. Online newspapers frequently rewrite their headlines in order to encourage more clickthroughs, or update the articles during the day as more information is discovered. Sometimes the newspapers are transparent about these changes, noting what correction has been made, but most of the time they only note that "an update was made" and do not provide details. For example, see this article from Bloomberg, which was updated /edited 3 times, although no record of the edits is available.
The Quick Brown is a website that tracks changes to Fox News headlines. It's rather shocking how many changes are made daily.
In Orwell's World...
In Orwell's world, the company which deleted the file would insist that there had never been a file in the first place, an assertion readers would be too browbeaten or passive to contradict.
The Kindle episode brings to light the "censorship" already occurring with post-publication editing to alter and remove content at websites and blogs. The traces remain only on one's saved webpage or whatever Internet cache may have archived the page.
As an aside, I must note a further Orwellian irony. I picked up at a local bookstore today a finger puppet fashioned in Orwell's likeness. The man was anything but! Thank goodness for his stout defense of Western civilization and democratic principles.
Very truly yours,
Rich Kuslan
www.Asiabizblog.com
www.NewHavenLawyer.US
Reasons for stealth editing
I think that the lax policies on reporting modifications to an article can be attributed to pride and time. When an addition is made to an article, there is some cost to alerting readers to the change: 1) It can make you look foolish and 2) its simply takes time to do so. I'm not sure which wreaks more havoc, though I'm guessing #2.
For example, in one of my posts I incorrectly summarized La Russa's claims against Twitter. When one of my editors pointed this out, I changed the post and explained my change in a footnote. If I had done otherwise, I think it would have been somehow dishonest. But it certainly would have looked better if the whole operation left no scars.
On the other hand, in this very post, I originally forgot to mention that this was not the first time that Twitter and the greater Internet community raged against Amazon. So I added a sentence linking to a post on #amazonfail. I did not feel the need to explain this change. Maybe I did not note the change because I did not think it changed a vital part of the article, maybe I didn't because I was lazy. The problem is, since there is no one convention to follow, it becomes a judgment call. And its easy to make the wrong call when your reputation or time (or possibly advertising dollars) are on the line.