Big Brother: Amazon Remotely Deletes 1984 From Kindles

[The Golden and Black Sun]

July 17th, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore

Ever bought a book from Barnes and Noble, then turned around to find it missing from your bookshelf and replaced with a voucher? Bizarre though it may seem, that’s exactly what’s happened to hundreds of owners of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books, with Amazon remotely deleting copies on user’s Kindles and crediting their accounts.

While this might be understandable if the copies were distributed illegally, the cause here appears to be a publisher which decided it simply didn’t want to offer a Kindle edition any more. Amazon’s response, as posted in the forums:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store

All of which underscores the fact that “buying” a book in the digital realm isn’t the same as “ownership” in the real world. As David Pogue at the NYTimes explains: “apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.”

Or as one of Pogue’s readers describes it, “it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/

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Excerpt from:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/43296/98/

Amazon takes a page from 1984, deletes Orwell books from Kindles
Seattle (WA) – We all have our bad days, but it seems that Amazon had a week of particularly bad decisions this week. First it was a $200 replacement fee for broken Kindles and now we hear that the company may have taken George Orwell’s visions of a future world literally and remotely deleted books from Kindle ebook readers. Meet Amazon, your Big Brother.

According to media reports, Amazon, erased George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984” from Kindle ebook readers and reimbursed customers for the purchase price. The company said the move was necessary as soon as it had learned that a company that had no distribution right had added the ebook versions to its store.

“When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told the New York Times. However, Amazon now thinks that the deletions were a bad idea: “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Herdener said. Sounds a bit like the dropped $200 fee for replacing Kindles that broke because of a protective cover Amazon sells.

The deletions of the Orwell books are somewhat ironic, as the novel 1984 imagines a future world in which privacy has disappeared. Describing a repressive, totalitarian government, Big Brother watches the population’s every move that is impacted by propaganda, surveillance and control. Amazon’s deletions may be beyond the comfort level of how much control corporations have in our always connected lives these days.

The New York Times said that the Orwell books removed were sold by MobileReference. An authorized digital copy of 1984 from the authorized published Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was available at the time of this writing. Animal Farm however, was not available.