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

[Richard Chirgwin]

In addition to Criag's comments: what the author of this article 
describes already exists. It's called the "world wide web". So what this 
guy's asking for is "please, can we wrap the capabilities of the Web up 
into e-paper, so that it can be vendor-controlled and trawled by 
marketers, because an e-book is so much cooler than a Web page?"

Humbug.

RC

On 22/05/11 4:10 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 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
>