Back in 2010 I posted on this blog that I didn't think that eBooks would take over the market. Well, I still believe that but I have to admit that my attitude towards eBooks have changed since I bought a Kindle.
The Kindle is easy to carry and because it stores so many books I don't have to lug a whole box of books around. This is especially important because I plan to go overseas later this year. I haven't yet used some of the more advanced features such as the news download or the annotation options, but it's so much easier to search for what you want and the page-turn speed is remarkable. Of course there are disadvantages. I can't read in the bath and if something goes wrong while I'm on holiday (my Kobo died while I was in South Africa – luckily I had brought over some real books too) I'm left without anything to read.
'How could you betray us?' I hear the bookshops screaming, but in truth I haven't. I still love my printed books and will head over to any library booksale in a flash. I often do the rounds of my local second-hand bookstores and I know that you definitely can't get an author to sign a book on your Kindle (even if you could it'd be rather impersonal.) I guess that my attitude has changed so that I now realise that sometimes you have to choose the tool that fits the situation you're in.
I don't generally listen to newsradio except when I want to catch up on the headlines, but my radio happened to be tuned to BBC World Service on Saturday and I'm glad that it was because I stumbled across a very interesting program. It's called "Click" and it's about global technology, social media and the internet.
The topic for this week was digital privacy and online anonymity. The host Gareth Mitchell was talking to a man called David Bond who has created a documentary about how the difficulties of remaining anonymous thanks to all of the technology that can be used to track you. He did his best to erase all traces of himself from online media such as facebook, ebay, online phonebooks and even called the airlines to get them to remove him from their flight databases. Then he asked people from the top private investigator firm Cerberus to track him down and catch him within 30 days, using only his name.
Apart from making me want to really watch the documentary, listening to the program got me thinking about privacy and anonymity which are a really big deal in the world today. David was trying for anonymity which I don't think he would be able to achieve (and from what I saw of the online trailer, he ended up getting rather paranoid), but privacy is certainly something that we put our trust in when information about us is entered into any technological device.
How many of you read the terms and conditions when signing up to a website, a service or buying a computer program? How about when you buy an airline ticket or use your credit card? I know that I used to just skim through them, but if you think about it, terms and conditions are long enough for their developers to hide anything in them. Just imagine if, after installing your latest word processing program someone turned up at your door demanding your firstborn child because you agreed to it in the T&C? Not only that, some companies will turn your information over to others for "marketing" purposes and you can't sign up to them without having that happen.
For me, the problem isn't that this is happening (because it's unavoidable) but rather my own attitude towards it. Not that I've done anything to have private investigators tracking my down, but that I'm willing to blithely give away that information to get services. I used to joke that when I signed up to Amazon they could hunt me down and force me to sell my soul, but I'm not sure if that's too far from the truth nowadays.
'How could you betray us?' I hear the bookshops screaming, but in truth I haven't. I still love my printed books and will head over to any library booksale in a flash. I often do the rounds of my local second-hand bookstores and I know that you definitely can't get an author to sign a book on your Kindle (even if you could it'd be rather impersonal.) I guess that my attitude has changed so that I now realise that sometimes you have to choose the tool that fits the situation you're in.