(Don’t) Buy Nothing

I’m teasing today’s exhortation for an economic boycott down a different train of thought. Do digital purchases really exist?

Hailing from the musty backroads of the Internet, mucking about coding websites back when the World Wide Web was being spun, the idea of publishing digitally was exciting. More people could see your writing! If they could find it. Google didn’t exist yet, but that was okay. Anyone remember Alta Vista?

I had a sneaking suspicion back in those heady days before the dot-com bubble burst that it was far too easy to pull a plug (or press delete) and make it all go away.

Now, corporations have herded us all to the cloud. I’m as guilty as the next person for trusting tens of thousands of photos not to vanish from Flickr… oh, but they sold out to SmugMug, who I already had a professional account with. But who is to say that alliance will outlast me?

My digital content certainly won’t. As soon as I stop paying for hosting it, zap, it’s gone. More than two decades of hard work eliminated from the public eye. That goes for any cloud-based platform where the creator pays the hosting bills. Or when said platform is sold to the highest bidder. Who knows what’ll happen in the future to what you put there today? We’ve already learned, to our chagrin, that Big Tech vacuumed up our creative work online to train AI. Without our knowledge or consent, and certainly to make money off it.

I believe in physical books. I bought a Kindle over a decade ago to test the digital waters, deciding it wasn’t for me. I spend enough time staring at screens while working. Reading is our evening relaxation – John and I don’t watch TV, even at hotels – and I want the heft of a book and the feel of paper in my hands.

A reminder for Buy Nothing day: your library lends books. And they’re free to borrow!

With my Kindle in hand, I’d dabbled in digital sales on Amazon. That experience deserves its own article. Suffice to say it wasn’t for me.

And here’s where Buy Nothing fits virtual purchases. In this case, ebooks.

With what appeared to be no more than a week’s lead time, Amazon rescinded the ability for Kindle owners to download their ebook purchases to their computers. Instead, those ebooks you picked up in the past are forever trapped in the Kindle ecosystem. You’ll now need their tablet or software to read them forever more.

Perhaps my fellow authors can enlighten me, but I recall no heads-up from Amazon that this was about to happen. It could be because my digital publishing account with them lays fallow. Or perhaps I deleted it in a fit of pique years ago. But I do still have a Kindle account for reading past ebooks I bought.

This move by Amazon underscores some harsh realities hiding behind the curtain of our digital age. We’ve been seduced by the fluffy glory of “the cloud” so we don’t focus on the transactional side of the transaction. But corporations do.

You Bought Nothing

Intangible items don’t exist. They can vanish in the blink of an eye. What you bought was a license to see or listen to that piece of creative work. You can’t even access your purchase without the use of an approved device and interface software owned by some corporation who doesn’t give a hoot about any of us authors, musicians, or artists who’ve allowed their creative work to be digitally published.

You Can’t Share It

You can gift a certificate for a digital item, but not the item itself, if you can’t access a physically downloaded copy (a file like a PDF or ePub or MP4). I’m pleased that Apple added Family Sharing to IPhone, but c’mon, why wasn’t it there all along? And why will those iTunes purchases vanish when my account goes dark?

You Can’t Control It

With a book in hand, you can put it on a shelf and know that twenty years from now it’ll be the same when you open it. Not so with ebooks. Again, Amazon is quietly changing the contents of books behind the scenes, as we learned when “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and other Roald Dahl books were rewritten “for today’s sensibilities.” I don’t recall whether the copyright holder or the publisher made that decision, but Amazon updated your ebook purchases without your consent.

It’s a dangerous power to be able to do that to a book. While I understand the rationale, I’m utterly against changing a dead author’s original words. Bring out a new edition and make it plain it isn’t what the author wrote long ago, but do not meddle with words published on the (digitally) printed page.

Censorship is in the control of those who control the media. And the government. Yesterday, censorship reared its ugly head through an announcement posted on all of the social media accounts of U.S. Air Force bases, Naval stations, and Army posts:

Content on this platform is being reviewed and removed to align with the President’s executive orders and DoD priorities in accordance with DoD Instruction 5400.17, ‘Official Use of Social Media for Public Affairs Purposes.

I find that chilling. Who’s to say where this will lead? Might you find your nonfiction ebooks being updated in the background to say things they didn’t before?

Can you really trust Amazon? (My experience: NO!)

As an author, I ask of you: Don’t buy “nothing” anymore.

Buy physical books from independent booksellers, publishers, or from your favorite author directly. Or borrow them from a library.

We won’t mind. But we do want to keep your trust.

PS. If you read about the new direction of the Washington Post editorial department at the behest of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, you, like I, may wonder about the timing of this ebook lockdown. This editorial cartoon by Ann Telnas (and her links) say it all about Bezos and censorship.