Kindling for the bonfire of book ownership

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Word of Mouse
Posted By TPM On May 21, 2010 (7:25 am) In Columns, Podcasts

Luciano Floridi gathers kindling for the bonfire of book ownership

Luciano Floridi

On December 26, Amazon released the following statement: “On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books”. As sceptics have noticed, Christmas is hardly the time when you buy a bestseller online, whereas last December 25 was the D-day when armies of Kindles, which had lain camouflaged under the trees for a while, snapped into action and led their happy owners to purchase some of the 390,000 electronic titles available from Amazon. Further doubts on the actual success of the Kindle are raised by Amazon’s secrecy about how many it has actually sold (1.5 million is a recent estimate).

And yet, that press release leaves one wondering whether some symbolic threshold between the analogue and the digital might have been overstepped. Recall that the Kindle is not alone: there are many other dedicated e-book devices – including Barnes & Noble nook (with a catalogue of 1m books) and Sony’s reader – which are serious competitors but also allies in the mutual guerrilla campaign against traditional books. The usual rumours about the possibly moribund state of the old printing medium have started spreading again. Apple, it is argued, will hit the final blow with its tablet, the iPad. The lesson of disposable and electric shaving razors comfortably sharing the skin of millions of people seems to have gone astray.

On January 1, Microsoft’s Windows Azure went into production. Azure is Microsoft’s platform for cloud computing. In cloud computing, applications do not run locally and data are not stored in your computer, but everything happens online, through remote data centres. As any user of Google docs has experienced, when you use cloud applications you log in, customize them, and start using them, saving their outputs in the online space, which is then accessible elsewhere.

Cloud computing represents the coming of age of the Turing machines we invented more than half a century ago. Today, we are gradually accepting the fact that computers are their best friends. They do not need us, we should not be in the loop, and cloud computing is the first, graceful step out of it. This sort of unmanned computing enables digital resources to be monitored and managed more efficiently and cost-effectively because independently of their users and consumers, who have better things to worry about. Conceptually, this means decoupling the intelligent manipulation of data and information from the algorithmic and physical substratum that make it possible.

The Kindle and Azure have much in common. The more we live and interact in the infosphere the less necessary and reasonable it becomes to own and directly administer physical chunks of it, being these shelves of printed paper, CDs, DVDs or jukeboxes of hard disks. Amazon, unsurprisingly, is one of the biggest players in cloud computing. In 2005, it realised that its data centres were largely underused in off-peak-times and so it started to sell its computing services on the basis of a utility business model.

The Kindle and Azure also share a problem. We might call it digital enclosure. In British history, enclosure refers to the seizure of common land and change to private property. The process began in the 14th century and became widespread in the 15th and 16th centuries. It represented the end of the old system of arable farming in open fields and the rise of fewer, richer landowners. The infosphere is running a comparable risk. Amazon has applied many “enclosure” strategies for the Kindle. For example, only recently an Israeli hacker claimed to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon’s Kindle software for PCs, to allow e-books to be transferred as pdf files to any other device. Likewise, one of the major problems with cloud computing is that companies will always be tempted to lock you in, so that, once your data are stored in, or your applications have been developed for, a specific cloud, it becomes very hard to move them elsewhere.

The future lies in a seamless, integrated infosphere. E-books and cloud computing are two good steps towards it. But we need to ensure that their digital enclosures are only temporary measures which, although useful to promote them, do not turn into failures and undermine their value.

Luciano Floridi holds the Research Chair in Philosophy of Information at the University of Hertfordshire and is president of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy.

Article taken from TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine - http://www.philosophypress.co.uk
URL to article: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1259

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