I was listening to CBC radio in the car last weekend, I can’t remember what show it was, but it was a panel of people from the book world, a couple of authors and a publisher and they were discussing the future of books. The main point of the discussion was the authors wanting their work protected and how much harder it was to do that with the spread of digital books. The host mentioned Amazon and the 1984 controversy where Amazon deleted copies of the novel people had downloaded for their Kindle because they didn’t have the proper rights to sell the book. The big deal was Amazon did this without telling the Kindle owners. This lead the conversation to the idea that companies like Amazon could, I don’t know if they do or not, track what pages you read more than others in a book you’ve downloaded. This came as a big surprise to the authors.
These are people fighting to have their books on Amazon raised from $9.99 to $13.99 when the book is in hardcover because they want the money they loose when people buy the digital book and not the physical one that costs $30. The fact that the two authors on the show didn’t have even a basic education about how digital technology works is a perfect example of the bigger problem that is going to affect the Internet over the next few years. The people making the decisions and those fighting for things like extreme copyright protection don’t understand what they fighting against. I strongly believe that their “victory” against Amazon to raise the price of their books will lead to a loss in money. People that were willing to pay $9.99 for a book might not be willing to pay $13.99 and will either wait until the price goes down or more likely, will download the book from a torrent site.
If the decisions made on things like access to information on the web or to the Internet itself, it will only lead to a backlash that would be worse than if they had left things the way they were. But with issues like Net Neutrality and censorship being fought in countries like Canada and Australia, this is a problem that can only be solved with education. We need to educate not only the people in charge but younger people, so they when they move into positions of power, they know how things like the Internet work and they can make the right decisions, not ones fueled by money. I think it’s been proven that you can be open-source and make money. If you make a good product or proved a good service, people will pay for it, you don’t have restrict access to your product to do it. Maybe in the near future, schools can add a basic Internet education class and show people how the Internet really works, so in the future, decisions won’t be made based on things people have seen in movies or by what they’ve been told by lobbyists.