Comments | palshife_sakura: We Don't Need To Burn Books Anymore

palshife_sakura

We Don't Need To Burn Books Anymore

Jul 17, 2009 16:15

As if I needed any more reasons not to buy a Kindle, Amazon gives me one more. Amazon remotely deleted this person's copy of the classic novel Animal Farm, along with anyone else who purchased an electronic edition of this book. Furthermore, and the irony of doing so apparently lost upon Amazon, they bent over to the publisher's whims, and threw ( Read more... )

Comments 5

araquan July 17 2009, 23:25:05 UTC

This is why Dead Trees still win.

phineus July 19 2009, 06:16:37 UTC

no MP3 player/e-Reader can match the weight and smell of a book.

calafin July 18 2009, 03:51:04 UTC

*facepalms* oh, lovely... why am I having Fahrenheit 451 flashbacks?

ionotter July 18 2009, 04:56:13 UTC

Well, according to the article on SlashDot, there's a couple of things that happened.

1. Amazon wasn't authorized to sell the digital versions. They apparently had a "gentleman's agreement" or somesuch, and the estate of George Orwell decided to be rather ungentlemanly and cancel the agreement.

2. Amazon did not delete the volumes from the Kindle. What happened is that people purchased the books and left them in their archive on Amazon's servers. Anyone who had the books downloaded to their Kindle still has it on their Kindle. Likewise, anyone who downloaded it to their desktop machine also has it.

3. Amazon may have given everyone that bought the books a refund-which is smart-but they've apparently violated their own TOS. To whit:

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as ( ... )

palshife_sakura July 18 2009, 09:31:08 UTC

1) Tough titty. It's not my or anyone else's problem that Amazon didn't hammer out the proper contract.

2) As quoted from the first link, when the person enquired about the copy of Animal Farm still on their Kindle:

The next time the wireless is activated on your device ” Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi)” by George Orwell will be removed.

3) See my point made in item 1.

They are within their right to discontinue sales of a book, if doing so is no longer feasible. That's not where I have issue. Where I have a problem, is when they have the ability to delete something I own, regardless of it being their fuck-up, regardless of whether they refund me my money. It scares me that it would be so easy for them to make a book disappear. That's not the sort of information control I'd like for a corporation to have.