Orwell deleted from the Kindle

It seems that George Orwell's books are suffering from censorship even this digital age.

On Friday the New York Times reported that Animal Farm and 1984 both vanish from Amazon's Kindle machine but it seems that copyright is the problem.

According to the paper

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Who will meet the challenge?

Ray Marcano writes his thoughts about what he calls the newspaper renaissance

We should find out, in the next 12 to 18 months, who accepts the challenge of change, and what steps they take to meet the challenge.

he writes

Amongst his ideas?

1.The Kindle comes to the fore

They'll enter into partnerships with cell or cable companies for information distribution.

2.Companies that own more than one information outlet (newspapers, radio, television, cable) in the same city will start rapidly combining them into one operation that can provide news at a lower cost

3.some newspapers will stop sending news to Google, reasoning that the mostly out of market referral traffic isn't valuale to their local advertisers.

Digital clutter

Nicholas Carr writes that Tim Bray, the software writer is

looking forward to the fast-approaching day when he'll be able to get rid of his many books, leaving his walls even emptier. Their contents, too, will be digitized, turned into files that can be displayed on a handy e-book reader like Amazon's Kindle.

He writes: "I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular." Physical books, he says, "are toast," and that's "a good thing."

However all he will be doing is replacing one clutter with another

When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.

Ht-Andrew Sullivan

A frightening vision of the future-you will never be alone with a book

comes from the Wall Street Journal's Steven Johnson who looks at the consequences of the E book in this great article.

an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Why you may ask-well

1.one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

2.Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

What the Kindle is really doing to the publishing industry

I have written about the advance of the electronic reader the Kindle before on this blog.
Is it a threat to the publishing industry,will it kill the centuries old tradition of book reader,will libraries be reduced to empty warehouses?

Maybe all three but its arrival has coincided with structural changes in the publishing world as this article by Marion Maneker suggests

The cutbacks that are happening in the publishing industry are not related to its entry

book chains are falling victim to the same disease that killed the independent bookstore. High-margin sales—big best-sellers that come in the back of the store in a shipping box and leave through the front with a customer in the space of a few hours or days—have migrated to other outlets.

However it arrival will coincide with a gap in the market by these structural changes.

The collapse of bookstores almost ensures that the Kindle will thrive.

Americans will soon be able to read the Mail on their Kindle's

Interesting story via Paid Content.

The Daily Mail is to subject users of the Kindle electronic reader to the wonders of Middle England.

James Bromley, MD of Daily Mail's website Mail Online, said, "We're in talks with Amazon to launch in the US in the near future and we're also talking about the UK version. The advantages are quite simply the quality and size of the screen."

via new media age