The abuses of literacy: Amazon kindle and the right to read

Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 297-317

  Striphas, Ted ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Kindle; Privacy; Reading

Indexed keywords

EID: 79960447436     PISSN: 14791420     EISSN: 14794233     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14791420.2010.504597     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. "Oprah's Favorite New Gadget", The Oprah Winfrey Show (October 24, 2008), http:// www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20081024_tows_kindle/2 (accessed July 4, 2009).
2. Steven Levy, "The Future of Reading", Newsweek (November 26, 2007): 58-64. "Jeff Bezos Interview", The Charlie Rose Show (November 19, 2007), Lexis-Nexis [transcript] (accessed January 14, 2008).
3. "Jeff Bezos Interview", The Charlie Rose Show (November 19, 2007), Lexis-Nexis [transcript] (accessed January 14, 2008).
4. Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 2009), 111-40.
5. see also Cecelia Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).
6. Kathleen Rooney, Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2005).
7. Hereafter I refer to "Ian" without quotation marks and as a "he", recognizing that this internet handle may not properly identify her or him by name or sex.
8. Ian, "Amazon Has Banned My Account*My Kindle Is Now a (Partial) Brick", Mobile-Read (April 6, 2009), http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t_44350& highlight_amazon_banning, post #1 (accessed July 4, 2009).
9. Ian, "Amazon Has Banned My Account*My Kindle Is Now a (Partial) Brick", Mobile-Read (April 6, 2009), http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t_44350& highlight_amazon_banning, post #16.
10. Joseph Turow, Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006), 96.
11. Ian, "Amazon Has Banned My Account", post #16.
12. Ian, "Amazon Has Banned My Account", post #77.
13. Note that the consumer advocacy website The Consumerist picked up on and publicized Ian's story. This may have had something to do with Amazon. com's decision to reinstate his account.
14. Chris Walters, "Amazon Can Ban You From Your Kindle Account Whenever it Likes", The Consumerist (April 15, 2009), http://consumerist.com/5213774/ amazon-can-ban-you-from-your-kindle-account-whenever-it-likes.
15. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet*and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 106; emphasis in original.
16. Thomas Z. Freedman, A Kindle in Every Backpack: A Proposal for eTextbooks in American Schools, White Paper (Washington, DC: Democratic Leadership Council, 2009), http:// www.dlc.org/documents/DLC_Freedman_Kindle_0709.pdf (accessed July 15, 2009).
17. Jeffrey R. Young, "This Could Be the Year of e-Textbooks", Chronicle of Higher Education (September 11, 2009), A1, A12.
18. Raymond Williams, "Culture and Technology", in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 134.
19. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 67.
20. C.f.: David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). [15] See, e.g., Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London and New York: Verso, 1976).
21. See, e.g., Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, trans. David Gerard (London and New York: Verso, 1976).
22. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
23. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
24. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1982).
25. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
26. Striphas, Late Age of Print, 23-6.
27. Quoted in Levy, "Future of Reading", 57.
28. "Jeff Bezos Interview", n.p.
29. The phrase "paradox of the e-book" is an homage to James Carey, "The Paradox of the Book", Library Trends 33 (1984): 103-13.
30. The packaging for Kindle's successors, Kindle 2 and the larger Kindle DX, has been streamlined. The bulky white codex has been replaced with a more modest brown box, although the inner wrapping preserves the cascading typography aesthetic of the original. The leather folio is an optional accessory on the newer models.
31. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J.E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
32. Levy, "The Future of Reading", 57. Note that the second generation Kindles*Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX*are thinner and lighter. Both, however, continue to be compared with inkon-paper referents in Amazon's promotional materials. See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/ Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Generation/dp/B00154JDAI/ref_amb_link_84549771_1? pf_rd_m_ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s_center-1&pf_rd_r_045P15HANREDG818MK8R&pf_rd_ t_101&pf_rd_p_482492931&pf_rd_i_507846; and http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-DX-Amazons-Wireless-Generation/dp/B0015TCML0/ref_kin2w_ddp (both websites accessed July 15, 2009).
33. Quoted in Levy, "Future of Reading", 60.
34. c.f. Nicholson Baker, "A New Page: Can the Kindle Really Improve on the Book?" The New Yorker (August 3, 2009): 25.
35. Jeff Bezos, quoted in "Oprah's Favorite New Gadget", http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/ oprahshow/20081024_tows_kindle/3 (accessed July 4, 2009).
36. Michael Arrington, "Amazon May Sell $750 Million In Kindles by 2010 (That's A Lot Of Kindles)", TechCrunch (May 14, 2008), http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/14/amazonmay-sell-750-million-in-kindles-by-2010-thats-a-lot-of-kindles/ (accessed July 5, 2009).
37. Erick Schonfeld, "We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000", TechCrunch (August 1, 2008), http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/we-know-how-many-kindles-amazon-hassold-240000/ (accessed July 5, 2009).
38. Erick Schonfeld, "Those Kindle Estimates Keep Going Up", TechCrunch (August 11, 2008), http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/those-kindleestimates-keep-going-up/ (accessed July 5, 2009).
39. Michael Arrington, "Three Million Kindles Sold, Apparently", TechCruch (January 29, 2010), http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/29/3-million-amazon-kindles-sold-apparently/?utm_source_feedburner&utm_medium_feed& utm_campaign_Feed%3A_Techcrunch_%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content_Netvibes (accessed February 17, 2010).
40. Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 59.
41. Plato, The Phaedrus: Compiled With an Introduction and Commentary by R. Hackforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 156-64.
42. see also Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 81.
43. Ong, Orality and Literacy.
44. Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994).
45. c.f. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 215-86.
46. Striphas, Late Age of Print, 23-6.
47. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 12.
48. Quoted in Levy, "Future of Reading", 58.
49. "Amazon Kindle: License Agreement and Terms of Use", http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/ customer/display.html?ie_UTF8&nodeId_200144530 (accessed July 5, 2009).
50. "Amazon. com Privacy Notice", http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html? nodeId_468496 (accessed July 5, 2009).
51. Alan Sipress, "At Web 2.0 Summit, a Look at What's in Store (and Storage)", The Washington Post (November 9, 2006), D1, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2006/11/08/AR2006110802094.html (accessed October 4, 2008).
52. Kevin Maney, "Amazon's New Direction: Point, Click, Make a Product to Sell to the World", USA Today (November 21, 2006), n.p., http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kevinmaney/2006-11-21-amazonuser-generated-products_x.htm (accessed October 4, 2008).
53. Spence Reiss, "Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon. com Today", Wired (April 21, 2008), n.p., http://www.wired.com/ techbiz/it/magazine/16-05/mf_amazon (accessed October 4, 2008).
54. Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008): 72-5.
55. c.f. Wade Roush, "Servers for Hire", Technology Review (September 28, 2006), http://www.technologyreview.com/business/17554/ (accessed July 22, 2009). There Amazon CEO Bezos states that its Web Services unit "is a completely separate business that will grow up in its own way."
56. Carr, Big Switch, 74.
57. Carr, Big Switch, 74.
58. "Amazon Web Services", http://aws.amazon.com/.
59. "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)", http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
60. "Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)", http://aws.amazon.com/s3/.
61. "Amazon SimpleDB", http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/.
62. "Amazon CloudFront", http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ (all websites accessed July 22, 2009).
63. Sarah Mahoney, "Keeping Amazon in Check: Consumers Plucking Up the Fruits of Bezos' Labor, But Privacy Crusaders Are on the Prowl", Advertising Age (June 1, 2005): n.p., Lexis-Nexis (accessed February 21, 2009).
64. Robert D. Hof, "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet", Business Week (November 13, 2006), http:// www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_46/b4009001.htm (accessed October 4, 2008).
65. see also Martin LaMonica, "Amazon: Utility Computing Power Broker", CNET News (November 16, 2006), http://news.cnet.com/Amazon-Utility-computing-powerbroker/ 2100-7345_3-6135977.html (accessed October 4, 2008).
66. Fred Vogelstein, "Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet*and Keep Google Out", Wired (June 22, 2009), http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwall (accessed June 30, 2009).
67. Fred Vogelstein, "The Wired Interview: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg", Wired (June 29, 2009), http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/markzuckerberg-speaks/ (accessed June 30, 2009).
68. Carr, Big Switch, 72-5.
69. Eric Engleman, "Amazon. com: Don't Blame Us for Twitter Problems", TechFlash (April 7, 2009), http://www.techflash.com/Amazon_Dont_blame_us_for_Twitter_problems_42620667. html (accessed June 30, 2009).
70. "Linden Lab (Second Life)", http://aws.amazon.com/ solutions/case-studies/linden-lab/ (accessed June 30, 2009).
71. Carr, Big Switch, 115.
72. Chuck Salter, "#2 Amazon", Fast Company (February 17, 2010), http://www.fastcompany.com/mic/ 2010/profile/amazon (accessed February 18, 2010).
73. "Amazon's Hot New Item: Its Data Center", Forbes (February 2, 2008), http://www.forbes. com/markets/feeds/afx/2008/02/02/afx4606529.html (accessed October 4, 2008).
74. Oscar Gandy, "It's Discrimination, Stupid!" in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, ed. James Brooks and Iain A. Boal (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), 39.
75. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004): 73-97.
76. c.f. Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 1997).
77. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006).
78. "In accounting terms, goodwill is described merely as the market price of an enterprise above and beyond that of the fair market value of its tangible assets (i.e. real estate, buildings, inventory, cash, credit, etc.) less its liabilities. " Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, and Lewis Kaye, "Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Property in Online Digital Gaming", Cultural Studies 20 (2006): 186.
79. On the paradoxes of estranged labor, see Terranova, Network Culture, 75-80.
80. See also Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 70-81.
81. Daniel J. Solove, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (New York and London: New York University Press, 2004), 89.
82. On the embodied dimensions of reading, see: Carolyn Marvin, "The Body of the Text: Literacy's Corporeal Constant", Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 129-49.
83. Carolyn Marvin, "Bodies, Texts, and the Social Order: A Reply to Bielefeldt", Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 103-7.
84. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
85. and Manguel, History of Reading, 45. On reading's cognitive dimensions.
86. see McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy.
87. and Ong, Orality and Literacy.
88. Amazon Mechanical Turk, https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome (accessed August 28, 2009).
89. Carr, Big Switch, 218-19.
90. Hof, "Bezos' Risky Bet", n.p.
91. "Overview-FAQ", Amazon Mechanical Turk, at https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?-helpPage_overview (accessed August 28, 2009).
92. Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006), 24.
93. J.S. Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), 11.
94. Quoted in Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random House, 2004), 19.
95. Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, 87.
96. Elizabeth Long, "Textual Interpretation as Collective Action", in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 184-93.
97. Manguel, History of Reading, 51.
98. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
99. see also Solove, Digital Person, 49.
100. Solove, Digital Person, 42, 19.
101. "Privacy Notice", Amazon. com, http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html? nodeId_468496 (accessed September 7, 2009).
102. Solove, Digital Person,53.
103. see also 51_5.
104. Solove, Digital Person, 83, 92.
105. See, e.g., "Amazon Acquisitions and Investments", Meet the Boss, http://www.meettheboss. com/Images/amazon-acquisitions.png (accessed September 8, 2009).
106. Solove, Digital Person, 203.
107. Solove, Digital Person, 202-3.
108. "Privacy Notice", n. p.
109. Solove, Digital Person, 204-5.
110. David Pogue, "Some E-books Are More Equal Than Others", Pogue's Posts/The New York Times (July 17, 2009), http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-moreequal-than-others/ (accessed September 11, 2009).
111. Brad Stone, "Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle", The New York Times (July 18, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/ 18/technology/companies/18amazon.html (accessed September 11, 2009).
112. Justin Gawronski and Antoine Bruguier v. Amazon. com, Inc. and Amazon Digital Services, Inc. Plaintiffs' Complaint, U.S.D.C. (W.D.W.) 2009, http://www.scribd.com/doc/17956203/Amazon-Class-Action-Lawsuit-Filing (accessed August 15, 2009).
113. Geoffrey A. Fowler, "Lawsuit: Amazon Ate My Homework", The Wall Street Journal (July 30, 2009), http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/ 2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/ (accessed September 11, 2009).
114. Tim Klass, "High School Student Sues Amazon Over Orwell", MSNBC (July 31, 2009), http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32236930/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/ (accessed September 11, 2009).
115. Jeffrey P. Bezos, "An Apology From Amazon", Kindle Community (July 23, 2009), http:// www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum/?_encoding_UTF8&cdForum_Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cd MsgNo_1&cdPage_1&cdSort_oldest&cdThread_Tx1FXQPSF67X1IU&displayType_ tagsDetail&cdMsgID_Mx2G7WLMRCU49NO#Mx2G7WLMRCU49NO&tag_kwab-20 (accessed July 24, 2009).
116. Justin Gawronski and Antoine Bruguier v. Amazon. com, Inc. and Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
117. Miguel Helft, "Amazon. com Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Book", The New York Times (September 4, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/technology/companies/05amazon. html (accessed September 10, 2009).
118. Eric Engleman, "Amazon Settles Lawsuit Over Deleted Copy of '1984",' TechFlash (September 30, 2009), http://www.techflash.com/seattle/ 2009/09/amazon_settles_lawsuit_over_deleted_1984.html (accessed February 17, 2010).
119. Aeschalus, Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes, trans. Theodore Alois Buckley (Philadelphia, PA: David McKay, 1897/Project Gutenberg, 2008), e-book.
120. Levy, "Future of Reading", 57.
121. "Plastic Logic eReader Will Wirelessly Connect Using AT&T 3G Network", Plastic Logic (July 22, 2009), press release, http://www.plasticlogic.com/news/prReaderWirelesslyConnectATT Jul222009.php (accessed September 15, 2009).
122. Priya Ganapati, "Sony's E-Book Reader Adds Touchscreen, Wireless Downloads", Wired (August 25, 2009), http://www.wired.com/ gadgetlab/2009/08/sony-wireless-reader/ (accessed September 15, 2009).
123. As Cory Doctorow wrote upon learning of the Amazon/1984 incident: "Amazon claims that they won't do this again. But as every good novelist knows, 'A gun on the mantlepiece [sic] in act one must go off by act three.' Once it's possible for the mothership to remotely zap all our devices, the possibility exists that a hacker will attack them, or a courtroom will order an injunction against them (at one point, a US magistrate ordered ReplayTV to send out a firmware update that would brick its devices as part of the preliminaries to a court case), or the feature will go haywire, or the management of Amazon will change. " Cory Doctorow, "Amazon's Orwellian Deletion of Kindle Books", BoingBoing (July 20, 2009), http:// www.boingboing.net/2009/07/20/amazons-orwellian-de.html (accessed September 15, 2009).
124. Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 107.
125. "What Is the Commodity Here?" Differences and Repetitions Wiki, comment, http:// striphas.wikidot.com/kindle-the-labor-of-reading-worksite/comments/show#post-283003 (accessed September 15, 2009).
126. On tactics, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xvii-xx.
127. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty", http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/ twoconcepts.pdf (accessed January 4, 2009).
128. published originally in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 118-72.
129. Lawrence Grossberg, Does Cultural Studies Have Futures? Should it? (Or, What's the Matter With New York?), Cultural Studies 20 (2006): 1-32.
130. Ted Striphas, "Harry Potter and the Simulacrum: Contested Copies in an Age of Intellectual Property", Critical Studies in Media Communication 26 (2009): 295-311.
131. see also Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2006): esp. 273-300.
132. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).
133. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 118-50.
134. Julie E. Cohen, "A Right to Read Anonymously: A Close Look at 'Copyright Management' in Cyberspace", Connecticut Law Review 28 (1996): 981-1039.
135. see also Jessica Litman, "The Exclusive Right to Read", Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 13 (1994): 29-54.
136. and Richard Stallman, "The Right to Read", Communications of the ACM 40 (1997): 85-7.
137. Cohen, "Right to Read Anonymously", 1006; emphasis in original.
138. Cohen, "Right to Read Anonymously", 1013.
139. Cohen, "Right to Read Anonymously", 1010.
140. Cohen, "Right to Read Anonymously", 1011.
141. You cannot, for example, share or resell a Kindle title once you have finished reading it, as you might do with a printed book. On technological protection measures, see Kristin R. Eschenfelder.
142. "Every Library's Nightmare? Digitial Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources", College and Research Libraries 69 (2008): 205-23.
143. on the tightening of intellectual property laws, see Litman, "Exclusive Right to Read. "
144. Lessig, Remix, 23-114.
145. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 218.
146. Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression†: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 29.
147. Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), 197.
148. Cohen, "Right to Read Anonymously", 1037.
149. c.f. Jessica Litman, who states: "What the public needs is a copyright lawyer of its own to represent it. "
150. Litman, "Excusive Right to Read", 53.