Censorship and the future of e-readers

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 18, 2020

A Kindle, or any comparable e-reader, can be a great convenience. If you’re packing for a vacation trip (which you probably aren’t doing this year, but that’s another story), it’s nice to know that you can bring along all of Shakespeare, all of Trollope, a few dozen mysteries, and the Summa, without making your suitcase any heavier.

But there’s a disadvantage to Kindle. And I don’t mean only the pleasure of handling a physical book, or the ability to flip back and forth easily through the pages. I mean the fact that you can buy a Kindle book, but you still don’t own that book. You can’t lend the book to a neighbor, or pass it along to a child. You don’t have physical possession. Amazon does.

That distinction becomes more important when you hear suggestions that the works of Flannery O’Connor should be censored because of her politically incorrect attitudes. And Mark Twain. And T.S. Eliot. And Kingsley Amis. And David Mamet. And maybe even Ray Bradbury, since censors are not sensitive to irony. Suppose, at some future date, the panjandrums of public opinion decide that these books should no longer be available. With a few keystrokes, Amazon (or its competitors) can make that happen. The next time you log on, you notice that those books— the books you paid for— no longer exist.

If there is anything about the recent behavior of large tech companies that gives you confidence this could never happen, please let me know.