(1) It is not yet known if the author has broken the law, but the publisher’s lawyer’s overreact and force a “recall” before it even goes to trial, with the intention of minimizing damages in case they lose.

(2) At the trial, the judge decides the author has broken the law, so there is a “recall.” The author appeals the decision and wins, meaning he has not broken the law. But the recall has already happened and might not be reversed.

(3) The author has not broken the law, but to avoid a long and costly court battle, the publisher recalls the books anyway in an out-of-court settlement, which is done just to shut up the plaintiff.

On and on it goes. My main point is that I am not comfortable with the notion that publishers can control the book you bought even after you bought it. We can all go la-la-la and sing the happy Web 2.0 song, but in reality when you pit corporate interests against consumer interests — and the corporation controls the technology — the consumer will almost never win.

And for what it’s worth, even if the author did commit libel (according to the legal definition), recalling and redacting books from people’s e-readers is (to me) like going into a library and burning books.

If the author has broken the law, then he/she should be punished, and customers should not enjoy the results.

If the author has not broken the law, and it is the fault of a non-functional legal system that the customer loses out, then it’s not a publishing issue that we’re dealing with, it’s a legal one. If I wanted to get involved in legal issues, I would have gone to law school.

I don’t mean to say that our legal system is perfect, because it isn’t. I’m just not interested in discussing its flaws. I’d rather think about how to ignore them.

gonna start shooting people,
and see if that does the trick.

-bowerbird :+)

p.s. i saw where the crazy one
blocked you for saying my name
1.1 times… a serious crime, eh?

And two, it actually is libel, in which case I think they SHOULD update your book.

But yes, I agree that I don’t like publishers retaining control. Nothing good for consumers can come of that.

I run into these issues every time I start thinking about what it means to “own” infinitely copyable content. If you think about it long enough, you arrive at a ridiculous situation where you have to go to such great lengths to make the content behave like the old hard-to-copy content that I don’t think it makes sense to even pretend that we own it anymore.

That sounds all nice and stuff, but the reality is that it’s almost never your choice. It’s the publisher and the distributor who decide what your rights are. We’re at the mercy of what the publishers, in cahoots with Amazon, Kobo, and others, build and how they build it, and there is little doubt that they will build it in a way that benefits them. So the “reason” that “an update need replace your existing digital copy” is because that’s how they build it. Witness the famous and oft-quoted case of Amazon deleting books from the Kindle.

Jon Renaut, it’s not about authors profiting from libelous writing. That was just an example — and in the example the libel wasn’t even established (a lawsuit was threatened but not yet brought nor won) and it was the publisher who pulled the plug because their lawyers pushed them to be extra careful. My point being that the books on your reader are subject to the whims and knee-jerk reactions of the publishers (and their lawyers).

As Teel says, it’s really about ownership, and for the most part, we don’t own e-books even after we buy them. We pay for and receive a license to use (but not distribute or reproduce) the content. That’s not the same as ownership.

That also sort of applies with a paper book. We do not own the content, and we’re not allowed to reproduce it. But we own the physical object it’s printed in, which means nobody can come into your house and change it or take it away (at least not legally).

I’m not against e-books, but I’m not ready to dive in head first either. There are a lot of questions that I don’t have good answers to. (For example, it’s not uncommon for me to buy a book and not get around to reading it for 6, 8, or even 10 years. If I buy an e-book for my iPad today, can I be sure I’ll be able to read it in 10 or 15 years time?)

When it comes to the question of ads in books, I go back to the point in my original typo-laden comment, where I worry about books moving into the realm of “consume and dispose,” like newspapers and magazines, and what that means for book and literary culture. (Putting ads in books pushes them in the direction of being more temporal and seemingly disposable.)

What caught me more than that in the post was that you consider cloud-based the way of the future for eBooks. I agree wholeheartedly. At the very least, there should be a cloud-based rights clearing house for a proper form of actual “digital rights management” – for keeping track of the readers/consumers rights to the digital IP they’ve paid for, so that once someone has paid for a book/song/film their right to read/hear/watch it is protected, regardless of what device/platform they move to. Cloud-based eBooks is one of the good (and bad) things about the kindle platform, because it means I can move from kindle1 to kindle2 to iPhone to iPad to Mac/PC with the same library (and the same bookmarks, and stay on the same page) – unfortunately right now it also means that certain publishers can prevent one from downloading the books they’ve paid for to an nth device, or can alter/pull the book without asking.

I much prefer the Smashwords method – where once I’ve bought a book, I can download a local copy in my choice of formats and if the publisher makes a change (as per @blork’s worry), every version made available after I’ve paid for the book remains available to me. If I change devices and need the eBook in a new format, all the choices remain available to me. And if the publisher pulls the book completely, I still have the copies I downloaded. Some of the benefits of the cloud, some of the benefits of “ownership,” no silly DRM.

Doesn’t support dynamic ads, though. Not yet.

And as for your example – an author SHOULDN’T profit from abusing libel or copyright or anything else. Your scenario is a problem for the legal system rather than the publishing business. And if authors start changing things on whims and deleting content that customers thought they had purchased, then I suspect the market will take care of that.

But it’s all a side-effect of not really getting our minds (or our laws) around the concept of ownership when the “seller” still retains some or all of the control. You don’t “own” a Kindle if Amazon can still delete a book from it. You don’t “own” a song if the shutdown of a DRM server means you can never play it again. And you don’t “own” an ebook if the author or publisher can change it or take it away against your will. You are leasing at the discretion of the lessor, under a contract that can probably be rewritten at any time.

I think these things will work themselves out over time. With so much competition for our free time and our money, mistreating customers isn’t much of a business plan.