[LINK] What If Every eBook Was Its Own Social Network?

[Craig Sanders]

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 11:28:12AM +1000, Kim Holburn wrote:
> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110520/02430114350/what-if-every-ebook-was-its-own-social-network.shtml
> 
> > What If Every eBook Was Its Own Social Network?

I like gadgets, and i'm on my third ebook reader, and intend to get a
tablet soonish (probably an asus transformer or similar, and after the
source for android 3.0 or later is released and there's a cyanogenmod
build for it), but i'm finding it really difficult to imagine that
i'd *want* to do any of the things touted as amazing features in this
article. most of them i'm neutral or indifferent to, but some are very
disturbing or off-putting.

the things i'm indifferent to are mostly because i have very little
(effectively zero) interest in discussing books. i buy them (lots of
them), and i read them. some are pure entertainment, some are food for
thought, and some (a rare few) have fundamentally changed the way i see
or think about things. if i like a book i'll probably read it again some
day (and will certainly read other books by the same author). the most
i'm ever likely to do is recommend a book to a friend with the simple
statement "you might like this" or similar. but i'm not in the least
bit interested in other people's interpretations of a book, or their
own personal baggage they've overlaid on the "meaning" of the book or
(worse, far worse) their wanky posturing about how cool or smart or
trendy they are because they've read and/or understood a particular
book. i particularly despise subjective tastes dressed up as objective
fact with the label 'criticism'.

i understand that lots of people DO like discussing books and that book
clubs can be a motivator for the time-poor and all that - and i'm fine
with that. good luck to them, horses for courses etc. but what disturbs
me is the idea that buying a book will soon come with all that baggage
whether you want it or not...and that, as with most things on the web,
all those features are just fancy bait to enable marketers, demographic
profilers, advertisers and so on to compile databases on people more
effectively.  AFAICT, "building communities and giving those communities
a voice" is just a noble-sounding euphemism for "suckering people into
giving up their personal information and their right to privacy".

remember: if you're not paying for the service, you're the product being
sold. and often you're still the product even if you are paying for the
service.



right from the start, i'd find the Amway-esque 'electronic invitation
from a friend" spam to be extremely annoying (and, if it occurs too
frequently, a reason to find a new friend).  Call me strange, but i
prefer my friends to be friends rather than just another advertising
medium or sales channel.

I don't want my ebook reader to send a reminder to my phone. i don't
want it to know my name, or my email address or my phone number...and
certainly not my credit card number or other banking details. i don't
want it posting twitter or facebook updates telling the world what i'm
reading and when. i don't want it offering me the opportunity to post a
1 to 5 star rating of a book. i don't want it to even have any network
connection at all, for that matter (at least, not one that *I* don't
have complete control over). i just want a static, relatively dumb
device that just makes it easier to read, browse, search, bookmark etc
books.

and that's not because the things mentioned in the article are
"difficult to get your mind around"...it's because I *have* got my
mind around them and realised that the cost (in erosion of privacy and
increase in intrusions) is far too high.


and fanfic is great in theory. it's a really nice idea, what with
fostering creativity and promoting an intellectual commons and all
that. in practice it's almost universally execrable. i know i'll be
missing out on a lot, but i think i'll just have to make do without the
purple prose of teenage girls writing out their fantasies of homo-erotic
encounters between their current favourite male characters.



but, then, my overall attitude to "social media" is that most people
really need to learn when and how to STFU.  They're also proof that
Sturgeon's Law is a gross understatement.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

BOFH excuse #311:

transient bus protocol violation