July 18th, 2009 
Every time I see my living room bookshelf, I feel silly. This is because it’s the ultimate poseur bookshelf. In it is a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Filling two more shelves are the ” Great Books ,” the sort of thing Harold Bloom thinks we should be reading instead of Harry Potter . All are bound like the volumes posed behind injury lawyers in nasty TV ads. There’s a stack of old National Geographics. Cheap art books sit by historical atlases, Gray’s anatomy and the DSM-IV. These possessions fill an entire wall. Most of them are pointless, too — who on Earth reads Euclid? Even interesting ones remain unread. So, I’ve been talking myself into getting rid of all these tomes and replacing them with a Kindle DX, from Amazon. The first decent electronic book , the Kindle is lightweight, easy on the eyes, and has enough storage to hold thousands of titles. There’s a huge online library and built-in Internet: no computer required. Its utility is such that even curmudgeons who lament the soullessness of screen reading are coming around. It is as beautiful as a book, and yet it is all books. Today, though, I changed my mind. I won’t be eBaying-off the heavies after all. Why? Because Amazon can snoop and shred the books you buy, and that’s just too damned creepy for words. David Pogue. writing in the New York Times, reported that hundreds of customers awoke to find that Amazon remotely deleted books that they’d earlier bought and downloaded . Apparently, the publisher determined that it should not offer those titles, so Amazon logged into Kindles, erased the books, and issued refunds. This was aptly compared to someone sneaking into your house, taking away your books, and leaving a stack of cash on the table. That George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were among the wiped books is so funny that it aches. The headlines across the ‘net wrote themselves. Down the memory hole! If this were the only example of this sort of thing, it could be written off as a mistake. But it’s …
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