Is the Amazon Kindle a Trojan horse?

The online-only paper Christian Science Monitor came out with this interesting article, calling the Amazon Kindle "a Trojan horse". I first read about the article from this post by my good, ebook-loving friends over at Teleread.

After reading the article, and then re-reading it a few times, this excerpt really stuck out:

…Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls "the landscape of the temporary": a hyper mobile and rootless society that prefers access to ownership. Such a society is vulnerable to the dangers of selective censorship and control.

I agree, and this is perhaps the biggest problem I have with the Kindle. When you buy an ebook, it is loaded onto your device. You don’t even really own the file that you paid for. Amazon pretty much retains complete control over the content on your Kindle, even after you buy both the device and the content.

This means that you are paying for access, not ownership, of the ebooks you buy from Amazon. Let’s pretend, for the sake of simplicity, that Amazon goes out of business (heaven forbid!). Your Kindle would become worthless – it’s too tethered to Amazon to get content from anywhere else. Yes, they do allow you to convert other content formats to the Kindle, but if they’re out of business, I’m pretty positive their servers would be shut down and this would no longer become an option.

Also, would you even be able to read the books you already purchased on your Kindle? I can’t say for sure, but probably not. Access to everything would become non-existent.

Doomsday scenarios aside, the risks of Amazon controlling access to such a large number of books to so many people, with their draconian DRM tactics, turns Amazon into the ultimate controller of information. The thought of Amazon censoring books might seem unlikely now, but we already got a taste of their power when they clamped down on self-published books by saying "if you don’t use our POD service, we won’t sell your books" (not in those exact words, but you get the idea).

When I buy an ebook, I want to be able to own the actual ebook file, not just have "access" to it. Owning the file means it is stored on my own computer (or other device) and I can move it, print it, delete it or even copy it to multiple devices if I want. And if the company that I bought the ebook from goes belly-up, so be it. I still own the actual file and I can continue to enjoy the ebook long after such a company ceases to exist.

Am I being unreasonable and paranoid, or does the CSM article make a valid point and we are risking our freedom and culture for mere "access" from companies like Amazon? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

UPDATE: After writing this post, I came across this article from CNET: Amazon invokes DCMA against Kindle e-books from other vendors. The article is from March 13, but very much related to what I discuss in this post.

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