Battle cries shriek over books in school libraries across the country. People on one end of the spectrum decry the horrors of depriving youth of certain books, no matter their content. Meanwhile, the opposite camp does not want to burn books. They simply want the reading material at their kids’ maturity level. Indeed, both sides of our current political spectrum have their own cries for censorship, as John Stonestreet and Maria Bear recently described.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books are burned as contraband. We see this trend in our current digital world of books. In the peak of irony, George Orwell’s classic book 1984 was removed from Kindle devices, the first such book taken down by Amazon. The company that published this particular edition didn’t have the license to release it.

Amazon purged the book from purchasers’ Kindle devices. Lawsuits ensued, Amazon settled, and since then, a debate has raged about Amazon’s right to remove books from a Kindle. They proved that they can do it. It raises important issues of property rights: Do you own your ebooks? Probably not. Especially not on Kindle. Amazon’s terms of service say,

Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.

Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. We may also terminate your right to use the Service at any time, including if we determine your use violates any term of this Agreement or involves any fraud or misuse of the Service. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Service, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service without refund of any fees.

Note that it doesn’t say they will terminate “if we determine your use violates … .” It says including if. And you’ve agreed to let them do it without giving you one cent back, if that’s what they decide.

Terms of service can be rough.

A Deeper Problem

Yet there is a deeper, more subtle problem here: not just property, but the content you read in your ebooks. If Amazon removes a book, you’re bound to notice. But there is also the silent editing of the books we read, 1984 style. Winston’s job in that classic was to make official corrections to past history, deleting all references to the former content:

Winston dialed “back numbers” on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of “The Times,” which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify (1984, Chapter 4).

While school boards quibble over the possibility of banning Nick and Charlie, so-called “sensitivity readers” are busy examining the timeless stories of our culture. Like Winston, they sit in their cubicles editing the stories of our times to make them more “inclusive.”

It’s happening to books written by authors who have passed away long ago, such as the classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They also edit more recent titles. R.L. Stine found out his Goosebumps books are being edited by sensitivity readers, but only when news articles blamed him for the edits!

Not even the Bible is safe. No, we are not talking about the Queen James Version. The NIV 1984 edition is memory holed like … um … 1984? When authors quote from the Bible, nearly every translation allows them to use several verses without contacting the publisher for permission. Curiously, Zondervan does not allow people to use earlier versions of the NIV Bible. From their permissions page:

Zondervan is granting permission for the latest edition of the NIV text only (currently 2011.) We are not granting permission for use of the earlier editions or version of the NIV text.

If your favorite James Bond novel gets changed, the printed copy on your shelf will be safe. Not so on Kindle. The publisher can update the Kindle text after you’ve purchased it. You could be reading the sensitivity edits instead of the original book you bought. If the book is already on your device, Kindle will offer an update without forcing it on you. But if you lose your device, get a new one, or delete a book — the next time you download that book, you will get the latest “edition” and not the one you originally purchased.

Preserving Our Culture and Books

We have options to preserve our books. Obviously, printed copies are safe, at least until the Fahrenheit 451 firemen are dispatched. For those of us who don’t have the space to hoard the Library of Congress in our spare room, safe digital options also exist.

Kindle, Nook, and Kobo may be the most user-friendly and elegant options for consuming digital media, but if you want staying safe with respect to these re-writes, you’ll need to expect some tradeoffs. I use the free and open source Calibre ebook library manager application. This software works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

You can set up Calibre to add books to your various devices. You can also download books for from many online libraries, many of them for free. The two best places are The Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. These resources have thousands of public domain books anyone can download and save, safely away from Winston and his memory hole.

Once you have the book there, it’s yours. Calibre does not keep a connection to the libraries it downloads from, so the only way to get a new edition is by manually downloading it again. It’s easy to use, too, by the way: It’s just a front end for managing ordinary files on your computer. You can even read your books from other devices, like your favorite ebook app on your phone or tablet.

And it will be the book you thought it was — safe from “sensitivity editors” and others who think they know best.

Do you still want to use a Kindle? I have one that has never touched the Internet, keeping it free from Amazon’s editorial demands. I simply plug the device into my computer with the Calibre library and move books to it. It still works all the same, just without syncing to Amazon servers. It’s safe.

Tom Murosky is the creator of Switched to Linux, a Free and Open Source Software teaching channel with over 12 million views. He also teaches on Christian living at Our Walk in Christ, and has published several books including Hezekiah’s Prayer.