The bookless school and "owning" Orwell's novels

The Boston Globe weighs in with an editorial on Cushing Academy’s move to trade in its books on a $500,000 electronic learning center, complete with flat-panel TVs, laptop-friendly laptop study carrels, and a $12,000 cappuccino machine, all supplemented with electronic readers (see “New England prep school drinks the E Ink“). Writes the Globe, “It’s obvious, at least in the world of periodicals, that electronic screens are rapidly assuming a role once played by printed paper alone. But the long-term shape of the Internet-era news and publishing industries has yet to be settled, and the precise route that progress takes is hard to predict. In the 1980s, plenty of forward-thinking schools got stuck with Betamaxes, or with computer labs full of TRS-80s and Commodore 64s.”

In addition to potentially being stuck with the potential Betamaxes and TRS-80s of the 21st century, adopters of all-digital media may find themselves short of content. Amazon.com, for example, recently reached out and surreptitiously retrieved copies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm that its Kindle customers had purchased. The company seems to have returned the e-books to their “owners” last week (see “Amazon to restore Orwell books to Kindle library“). Before reaching the point of no return on the digital media bandwagon, people and organizations would do well to think about what it’s going to mean to be an “owner” going forward. If you own a book, your bookseller can’t break into your house and take it back. And I for one don’t want Jeff Bezos violating my electronic space any more than my physical space.