In recent columns, I’ve praised Tesco’s Blinkbox Books service for honouring its commitment to customers by transferring its libraries to Kobo, a competing e-reading service of long standing. Blinkbox also distinguished itself by putting the source code for almost its entire system online, free, meaning someone could build a whole new service based on its work. So far, so classy.
However, a couple of former Blinkbox customers have been in touch to voice some disquiet at the process. As they point out, unlike Blinkbooks, Kobo is based abroad, in Canada, and so a different set of laws apply when it comes to its management of customer data.
For example, while businesses and government departments in the UK must comply with the Data Protection Act, the Canadian parliament is currently debating a new piece of legislation, the Information Sharing Act, which will allow all departments of government to share information in ways that are not currently permitted in the UK.
While it’s highly unlikely that any Kobo users will end up on a Canadian watchlist, the point remains: ship your data abroad, and it falls into other jurisdictions and other legal systems that you don’t necessarily vote for or understand. It’s a long way from the local library.
Those dissenters who didn’t wish to transfer their contracts abroad have, I’m happy to say, received a full refund from Blinkbox, so they can repurchase their lost books elsewhere.
But as I’ve often argued, it’s users’ history and data that make real their experience of reading – the highlights and bookmarks are analogous to the dog ears and underlinings you might make in a physical book. Even for those who move to Kobo, all highlights and bookmarks will be lost.
Shamefully, the ebooks ecosystem still lacks an open annotation interchange format; perhaps this could be someone’s next good work.
