The question's being batted around at Mobileread. They're pointing out that *every* online store tracks your purchases, and once the Daily comes out, it'll be pretty much equivalent to the Kindle and Nook for tracking-your-reading ability.
I think the EFF's chart is a bit skewed towards paranoia (and misses several other ebook readers which, like FBReader, don't track any info because they have no online bookstore or wireless connection). It's good to inform people that the companies they do business with are *watching* them, but a bit weird to confine that to the ebook world. And odd to compare Googlebooks to the portable e-ink readers. (I suppose there are people unaware that Google tracks *everything* that happens on their servers. And others who don't realize that's how they keep making better searches.)
Oh I know Google tracks EVERYTHING you do with it. That's a given. My take of the chart is sony keeps track of the stuff you buy from them, but I would hope it wouldn't track anything else on my reader. But the paranoia factor is strong. I'm guessing Googlebooks was on that chart because you can download some of the google books to your reader (at least you can on the Sony reader, although I don't use it because when I tried to download the books to my old Sony PRS-500 it couldn't do it)... I wonder with the firmware update to the 500 if it would these days.
With the update, it should read googlebooks; they're epub files, and the update gave the 500's the ability to read epubs.
But they're straight OCR conversions with no corrections--horribly formatted, OCR errors all over the place, dropped sections where the original scans are bad.
I think googlebooks is on the chart not for the public-domain works they license out to Sony, but because of the upcoming library features they plan on offering when the settlement thing goes through. They'll be offering subscriptions to non-public-domain works, and they'll be tracking a frightening amount of data.
Sony, AFAIK, currently tracks your sales but doesn't have any way to see what's actually on your Reader. That'll change with the Daily Edition, but we don't know what kind of access they'll have with it.
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I think the EFF's chart is a bit skewed towards paranoia (and misses several other ebook readers which, like FBReader, don't track any info because they have no online bookstore or wireless connection). It's good to inform people that the companies they do business with are *watching* them, but a bit weird to confine that to the ebook world. And odd to compare Googlebooks to the portable e-ink readers. (I suppose there are people unaware that Google tracks *everything* that happens on their servers. And others who don't realize that's how they keep making better searches.)
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But they're straight OCR conversions with no corrections--horribly formatted, OCR errors all over the place, dropped sections where the original scans are bad.
I think googlebooks is on the chart not for the public-domain works they license out to Sony, but because of the upcoming library features they plan on offering when the settlement thing goes through. They'll be offering subscriptions to non-public-domain works, and they'll be tracking a frightening amount of data.
Sony, AFAIK, currently tracks your sales but doesn't have any way to see what's actually on your Reader. That'll change with the Daily Edition, but we don't know what kind of access they'll have with it.