Discussion on:

eReaders: They're reading us while we read them

Col,

I haven't worked in a bank, but I did work in a market research firm that was gathering a lot of data about retail sales. In addition, I have worked in small businesses that processed payments from customers via credit cards. In the U.S., the payment processors (whether banks or credit card companies) don't even receive information about the items sold; all they get is the amount to be charged to the customer's account. The typical retail store simply doesn't have the item information available in the same system that performs the credit authorization and reporting.

In our market research company, we were receiving data from a variety of retailers, including large grocery chains (with hundreds of store locations), and on-line merchants. The retailers could report details of the items sold to a customer; as a "data aggregator", we could (with some difficulty) associate each retailer's customer IDs to the households, and build up a picture of each household's buying habits. But this information flowed from the retailers, not from the payment processors.

I don't, at this time, have any concerns about my credit card company knowing too much about my buying habits. I do have some concerns about the retailers. That's why I refuse to be locked into a technological solution where both the reading hardware and the reading matter come from the same vendor. Instead, I buy my books from many vendors, and read them on a platform provided by developers who have no direct relationships to any of the retailers.

I'm not too worried about amazon knowing my reading habits, they track everything i look up on their website anyway and there is a lot more of that. That said the first thing i do when i have bought an azw is download it into my kindleforpc and crossload it into calibre stripping the drm from it. That way i know that whatever happens i have that book available to me in an unencrypted format which i can convert to whichever format i may want or need no matter how the technology changes.

Interesting. I have not heard of that service. What format do you usually opt to use?

http://calibre-ebook.com/
rather than control my library of books on my kindle, which is probably difficult i use calibre on my pc to organize my ebooks. Then all i need to do is plug my kindle into my pc and calibre sees it and can send and delete ebooks on the kindle. It is really useful if you want to get ebooks from other places onto your kindle, although only usually if they are drm free like the baen ones are. One of it's biggest features is that it has the ability to convert ebooks from one format to another e.g. epub to mobi or lit to epub or even rtf/html to mobi; so long as there is no drm on them. I've taken some epub fanfic and converted it to mobi to read on my kindle. Someone has made some third-party plugins for drm removal but i have only used the amazon one (google calibre drm removal). I still remember using the command line program clit on a lit book.

I appreciate the information. I won't break Amazon's policy, but I will see if I can work with other eBook formats.

I found one that enables me to load Library books downloaded by the Adobe library software and in epub format into Calibre so that I can convert them to mobi format for my wife's Kindle. As a side effect they also remove DRM and the expiry date. So, as mentioned, all of our books from any source are in our Calibre Library, including some Techrepublic white papers.

My main reason for not getting one. A friend an I have the same taste in fiction so we kind of take it in turns to buy novels, then swap them. Can't do that if "they" can control my content.

George Orwell published his book "1984" in the year 1948. Assuming that he employed some time to write it, we can say that Mr. Orwell had predicted, in advance of more than 50 years of warnings what it is succeeding nowadays.
Or better, since the end of last century....

f a bunch of amazon!

I must comment on Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. This is, in fact, no different from a book or movie you purchase from a store. The "content" is licensed to you, not sold. What is sold is the medium but the content is restricted, i.e. copyrighted.

It appears that you are trying to create concern where none really exists. If I buy a book from a "physical" store such as Barnes & Noble and I pay for it with my credit card, Barnes & Noble could keep track of which books I've bought (especially if I have a gift card) and then let me know of books that map to my previous purchases. That is no different than eBooks. The only real way to go "off the grid" is to pay with cash and, well, who carries that much cash around (considering the cost of books today and the number I generally BUY).

When I was a child (back in the days of Ben Hur), my parents would purchase items from a store and inside was a warranty card and the warranty card asked questions about my parents, the family, income, interests, etc. that had nothing to do with the warranty (BTW, you don't have to fill those out to get the warranty - just keep your receipts). The data was collected and put into data warehouses for future mailings. Today, that has gone electronic and data collection spans nearly every aspect of our electronic experience. You can, of course, turn much of that off; however, many sites won't work unless, for example, cookies are activated. I'm OK with that. I surf using "private browsing" and delete all cookies when I close Firefox. And when I check various web sites that "claim" to know all about me - much of it is dated or just plain wrong. When sites track my IP address, they don't return where I live but where my ISP is. And public records have always been public.

So, there are things to worry about in this world (like location-based services) and then there are things where getting upset or worried is just going to get you upset or worried. Making a big deal out of books is, IMHO, not a big deal.

Dr. Nicholas Shaw

and how the DRM managed e-books are sold. Yes, the content is only ever licensed, but in printed books you buy the medium and can deal with that as you wish, even reselling your licence to another - thing used book ships. However, with the DRM managed e-books you can NOT resell your licence to another, which shows even the medium is only licensed and not sold to you. Add in they can arbitrarily take the book back off your system and cancel your ability to read it, and you can see what the real issues are.

Good morning, Deadly,

I certainly agree that there are major differences between the two; however, you cannot necessarily do what you wish with printed books. For example, you cannot copy all of the pages of the book - that's illegal under copyright laws. You are correct, however, in that you can sell your printed works while you cannot sell e-Books. I just responded to another post with a link to an article where publishers are, themselves, looking at removing DRM.

As to arbitrarily taking your e-book off your system, I wouldn't put too much into that "alleged" ability. I know of no instance where this has ever happened.
Best Regards.

book as obtained and not going into the copyright side of duplicating it etc. Copyright violation is a breach of the license agreed to with the purchase, and I left that out of the discussion as I was comparing what you can do with the two different media.

As to the removal of books, there has been a major case already, back in 2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Remote_content_removal

it was major news headlines and much discussion at the time.

Another aspect to look into is the special program Apple have created to help people write and create e-books. One of the terms of use for that is that once the book is created the book and content in that format belongs to Apple. not a nice way to do things.

I agree with everything you say except that eBooks are the same as a movie you purchase. I've read the policies and there is no place that I know of where they say they will demand the return of the movie.

All eBook dealers (Amazon for example) who abide by DRM have the ability to remove books from their eReader. I linked one example in the article.

Morning, Michael,

In reading about DRM (Digital Rights Management), I see nothing about an ability to remove e-Books from a users e-Reader. What I did find, however, are articles on removing DRM and this link about publishers beginning to remove DRM: http://kevinomclaughlin.com/2012/04/25/publishers-begin-removing-drm-from-ebooks/ on their own. I cannot see anyone ever removing an e-Book you paid for. Kindle, for example, allows you to install your books on any number of devices as long as you register them (I've done this with three devices).

DRM is encryption used for copy protection. I certainly don't want to get into the age-old argument of copy protection, we can leave that for another day. I've read several articles about how an e-Book can be removed (all from various interpretations; however, I've never heard of this happening.
Best Regards.

clients' systems - they had an unauthorised copy of the book 1984 for sale and when they found out it was unauthorised they just sent out a command and removed it from everyone's systems. That ability is there in the hardware and software of the proprietary systems and it's also in the End User Agreements.

Kindle Wi-Fi is turned off 99% of the time. I also only transfer via USB.

I'm wondering if anyone has thought of the other side of all this... if the government can gain information on you by gleaning your reading habbits, purchase habbits, browsing records, etc, what they are trying to do is build a case about who you are, probably for the purposes of proving motive to enact some crime.

I've never really worried about this much as I figure most of what I do is pretty benign from a social perspective, even boring.

But what if someone wanted to point the police in my direction? They corrupt the data to show that I'm reading questionable material and viewing nasty websites. I purchase certain products over the last few months that when combined could produce just the stuff they suspect I used in a crime... sounds sophisticated, but it could be just enough to put law enforcement on the wrong track and redirect the suspicion from the real criminals who have wiped their own tracks successfully.

Brings a whole new meaning to identity theft, and it might just be easier to do than actually get that valuable high risk information everybody guards so carefully.

A scary thing to consider. I know bad guys do something similar already. They hijack a person's computer and make is a repository/FTP server for illegal information. So guess who get's blamed?

attempt to locate and identify people involved in enemy intelligence and action networks like Al Quida etc. Another part is trying to identify individuals gathering data to attack places such as the Oklahoma bomber. One way is to see if they access certain types of information.

I do all sorts of odd research to make sure I get the settings and facts about certain places and organisations right before I mention them in stories I write. I know that a few years ago when I did a LOT of research on certain US gov't agencies and federal government buildings I triggered an alert within the US intelligence community (it helps to have contacts in your own intelligence community when that happens) and they did some research on me to see if I was a REAL threat to them or not. I know the locals told them I wasn't, but I may still have ended up on a US immigration watch list, don't know, don't care as I have no money or plans to travel to the US in the foreseeable future. However, it's this gathering of odd data that helps them work out if they should look harder or not.

This is important:

"However, it's this gathering of odd data that helps them work out if they should look harder or not."