Monday, 20 July 2009

The Age of the Digital Book

I noticed this link on a twitter feed from a friend (Lukas Golyszny) (Users need better education about loss of ownership about "their" data in cloud services? http://tr.im/t1TD; amazon http://bit.ly/7fL8v

The link is to an article in the New York Times that was posted on the 17th July: Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others.
The article discusses the case of the Amazon Kindle users who found that ebooks they had purchased had been deleted from their digital readers & what made a rather interesting twist to the tail was that some of the books were by the Author George Orwell. I think this article highlights many issues relating to digital user ownership. It created a stir due to the named texts that were removed and also due to the issue that the book texts had been bought and paid for by the users, who wrongly assumed they then had full rights of ownership of the books. However, ownership is a tricky word in the age of web 2.0, as we begin to 'own' many items in different ways.