Once not too long ago, I had a cell phone that used a sim card. (No, no relation to the digital life-simulation game). With some small caveats, I could basically buy a phone that used a sim card, plop my card into that phone, and like magic, it would work; all of my account information was essentially portable.
Then, Verizon bought Unicel, shut down Unicel's GSM (sim-card-using) network, and put all of us former Unicel customers onto its very-proprietary-and-locked-down CDMA network.
The result:
1. Verizon has the technology to force all of its customers to buy its phones. (A little more about how they do that is http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,235602,00.html , among other places)
2. Since you are forced to buy their phones if you are their customer, they can force all smartphone users to add a $29.99 data plan, whether you want to do anything except synch your Outlook calendar or not.
3. If you want to buy a "multimedia" phone, they can require you to purchase a $9.99 data plan (again, whether you just want to synch music ripped from CDs you own, or not.)
4. Of the very few phones left, you can only get an "upgrade" price if you give up your old (cheaper, simpler) plan. Otherwise, you have to spend at least $159 on a phone that doesn't get very good reviews.
Amazon does similar things with its Kindle; Apple does similar things with its iPod. If you want to use the service, they have "security" features built into their proprietary software that makes use of the service contingent upon buying services their way or the highway.
In other words, they manage to "secure" revenue for themselves by locking down equipment that we purchase.
This matters to all of us in libraries because while magazines/journals/periodicals have gone digital but have ultimately wound up in standard formats that can be shared and used (to some extent--PDFs can be pretty limiting), ebooks--somewhat like digital films--have thus far appeared more often in Kindle's digitally locked-down and proprietary format than they have in standard, sharable formats.
Those of us in libraries who think--as Unity College President Mitch Thomashow asserted at a meeting I attended yesterday--that ebooks are coming sooner rather than later anxiously look at the Verizon/Apple/Amazon example and wonder how we'll continue to provide information through libraries. At a recent Maine Northeastern Library District Meeting, we heard from a public librarian who'd been circulating a Kindle experimentally; she had to do backbends to make it so that the borrower couldn't put books on her personal credit card.
"Free Range Librarian" Karen Schneider wrote in a November 2007 Web4Lib list post:
"The disturbing qualities of Kindle have to do with how it hoses fair use, narrows the world of books and reading to an Amazon-approved collection, and finds ways to charge you for your own content (and conditions you to pay for blogs). It's definitely not a library purchase; it's a library killer, intended to restructure the world around one book, one owner."
When somebody as technologically savvy as Karen says that, it carries a lot of weight. Perhaps free market forces will render ebook and cell phone services equal and fair; perhaps regulation will democratize e-services as they become more critical to individuals functioning in a free society.
Perhaps not.
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