“E-Book Backup” is England’s playful counter to Amazon and the DMCA, as well as an invitation for all of us to reexamine our ideas of ownership in digital space. The convenience of cheap and easy cloud storage is appealing, but we must ask ourselves: with these systems, what do we really own and control? While Amazon eventually apologized and returned access to 1984, the unsettling realization that book buyers had such little control over their book, that it could seamlessly disappear — that should be disturbing enough.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
“E-Book Backup” is England’s playful counter to Amazon and the DMCA, as well as an invitation for all of us to reexamine our ideas of ownership in digital space. The convenience of cheap and easy cloud storage is appealing, but we must ask ourselves: with these systems, what do we really own and control? While Amazon eventually apologized and returned access to 1984, the unsettling realization that book buyers had such little control over their book, that it could seamlessly disappear — that should be disturbing enough.
