by Charles Miller

There is a certain body of water I have swum in, sailed on, and flown over at various times in my life. For hundreds of years, since 1550, everyone called it the Gulf of Mexico, so please excuse me if force of habit causes me to do so again at times. I admit to not being completely onboard with this business of renaming things on a whim. There are things that should not be changed, and I will come back to this thought in due course.

The news that has me worried about things that should not be changed is the announcement by Amazon that as of the end of February it would no longer permit customers to download and save copies of books they have purchased for reading on Kindle tablets or in the Kindle App. Unfortunately, changing the rules governing digital books, music, videos, and other digital stuff we bought and paid for is not new, and there is apparently nothing we can do about that.

Amazon made this latest rule change without fanfare and camouflaged it on the web site such that 99% of its customers likely have no awareness of the new policy. Many customers may never notice the change because their Kindle Reader and/or Kindle App will continue to work as before. The difference is that in the future it will no longer be allowed to physically hold your own copy of digital books purchased from Amazon. Any eBook you purchase should now be considered a library loan that is not your property and is no longer able to be kept in your possession.

Some readers might be asking why this would be important so long as Amazon still permits customer to read the books they purchased. Who wants to take up space on their hard disk storing copies of Ebooks when Amazon will do it for you? Some recent history might possibly influence your answer to that question.

In 2009, to clear up a copyright licensing issue, Amazon reached out without warning via the internet to completely erase from thousands of customers' Kindles and apps a book the customers had paid for. Prophetically, that book was George Orwell's "1984." Prior to this incident, customers did not know Amazon had the ability to do that.

In 2023, Puffin Books edited Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" along with other literary works to change politically-incorrect words describing obesity, mental health, violence, gender, and race. Then Amazon stealthfully reached out via the internet to alter all the copies of the books already in customers' devices. Customers who thought they owned copies of these eBooks expressed frustration upon discovering that their original copies had been replaced with new "sanitized" editions containing hundreds of alterations from the originals, and nobody could any longer access the original versions.

Books have heretofore been unchangeable instruments of record, but that seems to be changing when the books are digital. When companies can modify the content of electronic books on the fly that means they can change anything or everything in the historical record.

So what is the harm if a president decides to sign an executive order to change the name of a body of water? Today we still have non-fungible printed books and printed paper maps to which we can refer. When electronic books can be changed on the fly, and nobody can see the previous versions anymore, it becomes possible to rewrite history. Google Maps has already done that by displaying the name "Gulf of America" to users in the U.S. while here in Mexico the same Google Maps page still show "Golfo de Mexico."

There may come a time in the future when all of our history is preserved in digital form. Then, it could be entirely possible to rewrite history to conform to whatever new narrative the ruling regime approves. As Orwell said, "He who controls the past controls the future." Amazon changing its policy to no longer allow customers to hold copies of the digital books they purchase is one step in that direction.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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