Here is an article "Your E-Book Is Reading You" from the Wall Street
Journal (freely available)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories&goback=.gde_40592_member_129299703
A small part of the article:
"Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market
through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers'
digital reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for
example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read
and how readers of particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the
company's vice president of e-books, says the company is starting to
share their insights with publishers to help them create books that
better hold people's attention."
There is much to consider here, (possibilities of strange types of
feedback loops are my first thought) but my first reaction is to think
that the internet is becoming more and more a version of Jeremy
Bentham's Panopticon. Bentham's idea was that in an institution
(primarily prisons but not only prisons), those in charge should be able
to easily see the people inside, and these people would know they were
being watched but have no idea when they would be watched. Since no one
would know when you were being watched and when not, individuals would
tend to act as if they were always being watched and thereby behave as
if they were controlled by actual constraints. Some older and newer
prisons are built on these designs. It was also the idea of the
telescreen in Orwell's 1984:
"Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling
away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that
Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up
by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which
the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was
of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given
moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they
watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your
wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit
that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was
overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
The idea of the internet as modern-day Panopticon is not new. Of course,
computer servers all over the world record everything you look at and
how long you look. That is general knowledge now and apparently few care
very much. If we assume that everyone in charge is nice, there is no
problem but that is difficult to assume of course. Now even your *book*
is recording what you do with it, so that others can use the infofmation
for whatever their own purposes happen to be. In any case, the collector
of this information can sell it for a profit.
But there is another, new development that I just noticed: "Oracle
cannot block the resale of its software, top EU court rules"
http://www.zdnet.com/oracle-cannot-block-the-resale-of-its-software-top-eu-court-rules-7000000189/
"Oracle has found itself on the losing side of a judgement by Europe's
top court, which ruled on Tuesday that software licences can be sold on
a second-hand basis, even when the software in question is downloaded
rather than sold on physical media."
...
"Where the copyright holder makes available to his customer a copy ---
tangible or intangible --- and at the same time concludes, in return
[for] payment of a fee, a licence agreement granting the customer the
right to use that copy for an unlimited period, that rightholder sells
the copy to the customer and thus exhausts his exclusive distribution
right. Such a transaction involves a transfer of the right of ownership
of the copy," the CJEU said in a statement."
...
"Therefore, even if the licence agreement prohibits a further transfer,
the rightholder can no longer oppose the resale of that copy."
This is a very positive development, but I can't find out if this
applies only to computer software, or if it would apply also to digital
books. If it does apply to ebooks, what would happen if you bought an
ebook, sold it, it was resold and resold again, etc. Will the file
continue to collect information? And to attribute all of the habits of
these unknown people to you?
Curiouser and curiouser!
--
*James Weinheimer* weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
*First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
*Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
*Cataloging Matters Podcasts*
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/p/cataloging-matters-podcasts.html
Received on Tue Jul 03 2012 - 09:16:20 EDT