Following links around the Internet is always fun, maybe not very productive, but it can be educational. I was reading about the Kindle from Amazon, and came across a terrific piece written over a decade ago:

The Right to Read - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

This article appeared in the February 1997 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2).

(from “The Road To Tycho”, a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2096)

For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.

This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do.

Well, Dive Into Mark spotted this too, and tied it together with a few other pieces and came up with this:

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Act I: The act of buying

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

There are five more sets of quotes that are a must read.

And after reading this, I started to get a vision in my head of what they must have been thinking over at Amazon when they were brainstorming the name “Kindle“.

kin·dle ¹

(kndl)

v. kin·dled, kin·dling, kin·dles

v.tr.

1.

a. To build or fuel (a fire).

b. To set fire to; ignite.

Photo by Catherine Jamieson

Any thoughts?