Best Quote so far in Lankes class: "Information Organization is the crack cocaine of librarianship"
Reflections from Tuesday's class: Piracy is bad, but it is very easy. People become pirates because a) it is cool to be a pirate, I mean you get to wear an eye-patch and pillage other sea-faring vessels b) it is easier to download a song from an illegal site than jump through hoops to buy it from iTunes or heaven forbid driving to the store and purchasing a physical copy. Although, you don't actually BUY a song from iTunes...you LICENSE it...if Apple fails there go your songs.
So establish that Piracy is bad check, but it does have some interesting applications. Take e-books, they are digital copies...easily exploited and downloadable. Soon we might not have to pay for e-books because we could just download...illegally. *Insert gasps of shock* How could I imagine doing such a crude and vile thing.....quite easily. I borrow books from the library instead of buying them in the store... the author missed out on a purchase. I buy books from used bookstores...it is rare for me to pay full price for a book. How could pirating a digital e-book be any different? Would the author be losing out on a sale if I would borrow it from the library anyways then months later buy it cheap at a used bookstore? So I could cut out the middle man/men (woman/women?) and just download the book and read it instantly ( or however long it takes to download).
Oooohhhh I just convinced myself to pirate e-books in the future, bad Jessica. Ahem, not that I would do something illegal or something that would threaten the book industry....sheeet! I don't want to book industry to be attacked like the music industry has, so rude! AHHH DILEMMA! Well this will need further soul-probing and cost-benefit analysis.
Anyways, recap: Piracy bad, though it would be cool to say "argh" and be on a boat ( with my flippy floppys), Piracy will emerge in the e-book market, could I do it without murdering my conscience? This leads me (by no means through normal lateral thinking or writing) to the part of this post about paranoia. I am afraid that with the advent of the digital book that it will become much easier for corporations/governments/crazy parents/what-have-you to censor books and what books people will be allowed to access. It will be easier to monitor what people are buying, because the option of purchasing an e-book in cash is not available (if it ever will). I just keep having flashbacks to George Orwell's 1984 and it is not pretty the height of panic I can attain by worrying about this problem. People can try to placate me as well as they are able, but not being able to access a physical book to purchase/lend/liberate from evil dictator to spread to the masses just does not sit well with me. Or how Amazon took back people's copy of 1984 from their Kindles because they had violated a copyright.What's to stop these companies from going into our e-readers and erasing books from our libraries? It is much harder for someone to break into my house and steal my copy of the Communist Manifesto or my awesome Bible (seriously my Bible is awesome it has footnotes that discuss literary elements in the text and relevant historical information...makes for entertaining reading), or any of my politics and religion filled books (of which there are many because HELLO political science major with a minor of religious studies thrown in to make life interesting).
So, I have a Nook and will continue to read it, but it will not be used for my favorite authors or my serious, question inducing books that I sporadically read. I would not entrust my only source of Harry Potter to be an e-book or the Chronicles of Narnia or Rules for Radicals. Those books will be bought as physical copies which no one will attempt to take away from me for inappropriate content or political ideologies that are not in line with the current political regime without a severe confrontation. Someday we will regret turning physical books into solely digital copies....geez could I get anymore paranoid and cryptic? Sadly yes..... digital books are not the "Big Bad" as Buffy the Vampire Slayer would say, but I don't think that they are absolutely fantastic,they will lead to piracy in a new industry and easier censorship.
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