iBowdlerize
I am ready and willing and eager to see the promise of the ebook revolution realized. The potential power it offers to writers, in terms of creative freedom and possibly even compensation, is immense.
The downside: rewriting all the rules means tossing out the good rules, too, and then having to laboriously struggle to see that they re-evolve in their new electronic environment.
We depend on purveyors of books, whether they be booksellers or libraries, to stand up for the freedom to read. Along with this naturally goes the freedom to provide books to those who seek them. Like librarians, book retailers come to their anti-censorship stances ideologically. Dovetailing with this is the business interest of being able to sell books without fear of prosecution, nuisance or otherwise.
When book sales become merely a part of a broader strategy to sell a series of electronic devices, that anchoring business interest fails to translate to its new platform. With its infuriating, ham-handed effort to brand the iPad and associated devices as friendly to presumed soccer mom puritanism, Apple makes itself a threat to the potential of the ebook. More so, I’d argue, than does piracy.
Apple has determined that it has more to gain by acting as a censor than by supporting free expression. This is not capital C government censorship. Any proprietor has as much right to decide what to sell as I have to write what I want to write. But if it attains the commanding market share as a content portal it seeks and may well get, Apple’s private censorship will in practical terms exert an unprecedented impact on the availability of creative material. The company has earned its market share through hard-nosed business savvy, but also by running circles over its rivals in aesthetics and functionality. Through business and technical innovation, it’s accruing the power to stifle creative innovation, and intends to use it.
This is not and should not be Steve Jobs’ job. Although society needs its idiosyncratic irascible geniuses, they should not in charge of deciding what books we read or comics we look at.
Any sixteen year old boy in search of material his mom would disapprove can find it on an iPad in seconds through the mobile Safari browser and a wifi connection. Apple has its exquisitely form-factored ass covered there. It can argue, when faced by parental complaint, that it didn’t take a cut from the content found on the Wildly Weird Web, as it would from like material sold through the app store.
Well, tough. Apple wants to become the globe’s central seller of creative content, without the responsibilities that entails. If it wants to sell books, it should install parental locking functions, sack up, and act like freaking booksellers.