"A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?"
-- Fire Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

In Umberto Eco's wonderful book The Name of the Rose, a book is both the avatar of doom and its enactor. Many characters see in the book answers to forbidden mysteries, pleasures both corporeal and divine. Most avid readers can exactly identify with this feeling.

I recently bought an Amazon Kindle, the latest in a long series of gadgets designed to entice book-lovers away from their beloved paper relics and bring them into the twenty-first century. Until the Kindle came along, most attempts at duplicating the book-reading experience in an electronic gizmo left me cold: they were too small, the screens were too hard to read, the battery didn't last long enough, the content was scarce, and the interfaces seemed to have been designed by people who had trained under Torquemada. Ultimately it was more comfortable (and considerably cheaper) to continue carrying around my ratty paperbacks in my pocket.

However, paper books are dreadfully inconvenient in many ways. I cannot carry more than a few at a time; some of them are heavy bricks that resist being carried; and some are rare or expensive enough that I would bitterly regret their loss or damage. Most books will not lie flat unless you crack the spine. I often find the typeface and design of a book to be unpleasant. Books are very good, but they do have significant drawbacks.

Still I feel an almost existential dread about moving books off the printed page and into a world of electrons and pulses of light. It is the same fear that Winston Smith has in George Orwell's 1984: that a book can be subtly (or not so subtly) altered; that it can be bowdlerized, plagiarized, or expurgated; or that it can simply be taken away. And all without your consent, or even knowledge. Many feel that Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the thin edge of the chisel, just beginning to shave away the layers of rights we have built up over the decades and centuries. DRM becomes the modern enabler of Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

Writers also have reason for concern. Paper books are protected not just by laws of copyright, but are also protected somewhat by their very design. It is possible to copy a book but it is usually so labor-intensive as to be not worth the trouble, and the result is almost always inferior to the original. Not so in the digital world, where a copy can be as perfect and pristine as the original — in fact, there is no essential difference between copies, which leads to knotty issues of provenance and ownership. Writers — many of whom do not even make a living wage from their craft — see what happened to the music and film industries when these industries made the jump to the digital realm: massive piracy, lawsuits, competing (and incompatible) DRM standards, a farrago of uncertainty and recrimination. For this reason, writers and publishers are anxious to maintain control of their works while at the same time avoiding the more user-hostile aspects of DRM.