Neuron Culture

Late yesterday, Tom Levenson pointed me to a MacRumors post that said the latest update of Apple’s iBooks app would disable itself — refuse to show you the books you had bought — if your phone happened to be one that was once “jailbroken.”

This made me sit up quick, because

a) I have bought a half-dozen or so iBooks

b) when I moved to the UK last August, I unlocked my iPhone (which also jailbroke it) because that was the only way to make the phone work with a UK provider. (ATT isn’t over here.)

In other words, I had unlocked and jailbroken the phone because otherwise it wouldn’t work. That’s the only reason. I’ve loaded no outside apps or any of the tweak geeky things that jailbreaking lets one do.

SO I thought: I can’t be reading this correctly. If the MacRumors post is accurate, Steve Jobs was telling told me that my swanky iPhone had to serve either as a book reader that didn’t work as a phone, or as a phone that wouldn’t show me the books that he himself had sold me so I could read them on the phone.

This confused me. It made me hope MacRumors got it wrong, so that life would be simpler.

So I decided to test it. I got up  — this was at 5 a.m., but could you sleep with such a paradox banging around in your head? — and updated iBooks on my iPhone. I opened the app. And folks, those books are *gone*. Gone gone gone.

Those cute little wooden shelves Steve puts the book on when you buy them? Steve cleaned ’em out. He took ’em all. Steve took Mickey Mantle — early in his career, because I had just started that book. Steve took Stanlislaw Dehaene, the guy who studies how to read, for God’s sake. Steve took Ethan Watters. Steve took Dan Ariely. Totally irrational! Steve took Steven Johnson and Steve Martin. Steve took Winnie the Pooh! Steve even took Keith Richards, which is deeply, nastily discordant, but unpleasantly so in this case, and which could mean serious trouble for Steve Jobs himself — Steve, I tell you this for your own good, you arrogant thief — because if he took Keith, then in some essential sense he also took Mick, and Mick has lawyers.

I hope I’m not wrong about this, and that I will not end up embarrassing myself. Or rather I hope I am wrong. I hope I’ll load another update or a sync tomorrow or drop my phone or something and pick it up and turn it back on and find this was a glitch. That Steve will have returned the books. Maybe Steve did not really mean to erase my books. Maybe he really meant, as the update’s update notes, to deliver “a number of important stability and performance improvements.” Yet I’ve restarted the phone and twice reloaded the app and re-restarted and pawed around all over those shelves till I feel stupid, and I still can’t find my books.

So it appears that Steve Jobs has stolen them.  My understanding is I could fix this by updating my phone so that it carries the latest system software from Apple — but if I did, the phone would no longer work over here. Probabaly at the bottom of some 30-page form I checked a box that gave Apple permission to do this. But really. In any sensible sense of the word, I own this phone, and I own those books. Yet Steve Jobs, having sold me both, now tells me I must choose between one or the other.

I’m traveling a lot lately, often in places where signs or announcements over the PA warn you that pickpockets are working in this area. When this happens, I often check my iPhone. (I do this subtly, so as not to reveal its location to pickpockets who watch for such cues. They do that, you know.)  When I feel it, I’m reassured. How stupid of me. It turns out the thief has entered my pocket, and left with my goods, through the phone itself.