But, after today, I won’t be a Kindle. Why not? Because I don’t like the fact that a company can delete books on my Kindle regardless. And Amazon can do that. Recently, it deleted two books on Kindles from people that bought those books. The books were 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell and they were deleted because the publisher lacked the rights for digital distribution.

Funny fact: 1984 tells us about much the same thing. But I wonder; if Amazon can delete books this way, what is keeping them from looking around my Kindle… and what I have some private stuff on there. I don’t want some Amazon-employee looking through a PDF with let’s say, work-related content. It’s just wrong…

So, maybe the BeBook eReader then?

But, that could change…

European publishers have given a statement in which they ask the national governments of Europe to force the searchengines to start using ACAP. ACAP is a new technology, a sort of evolved robots.txt, that gives the publisher more control which content on the website is crawled, but also i.e. for how long it’s crawled. This way, you can ‘force’ readers to first go to your homepage and see the ads that your advertisers are paying for.

I don’t know if that new technology is something good. Let’s face it, old-style media has come to an end. The Internet is new media and smart publishers are shifting their combined forces to the online word. Printing ink and paper are relatively expensive, set against the cost for online publishing. I know I will never ever subscribe to another newspaper that only has a paper edition. But, should it have something like a Kindle, that’s were it gets interesting…

We’ll see how it ends, but I believe ACAP to be a threat to the free availability of information on the net.