Saturday, July 18, 2009

Kindle + Big Brother

UPDATED

If you're into keeping tabs on irony, check this out. Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia's love story aren't very happy -- and rightfully so -- the idea that we "own" the things we buy is pretty fundamental to... ownership. We're not sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the publisher of said novels, MobileReference, has changed its mind about selling content on the Kindle, and poof! Amazon remotely deleted all previously purchased copies. It's all a bit Orwellian, is it not? Good thing we "permanently borrowed" hard copies of both from our middle school library, huh? Let Hate Week commence.

Update: According to commenters on Amazon, this message was sent out from the company's customer service department:

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 occurred, 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.

UPDATE
We have another more serious example of Kindle buggery.  K-nine (Dead Dog Walkin') has a story about Ayn Rand's stuff being pulled.


11 comments:

Rodger the Real King of France said...

.
What's to stop Kindle from surreptitiously abridging my books to conform with changing political winds? And, does this mean I don't own the books "bought" from Amazon? That needs some fixing.

Although I'm using the first person, I do not own a Kindle, so may not know all there is about this.
.

JMcD said...

I don't own a Kindle so I'm totally green on ALL this, but wouldn't there be contracts involved and can someone change their mind and require Amazon to remove things which were ok'd by agreement?..... Something fishy here...More to this than meets the nose........ I suppose they made them take down "Little Black Sambo" as well. LOL q:-)

K-nine said...

I tried to send you this this morning. Sent it to Sondra at KisP.
http://deaddogwalkin.blogspot.com/2009/07/kindle-flame.html

Rodger the Real King of France said...

Tanks k-nine - I updated the post. Your example indicates something bit more nefarious. We;ll soon see, as this problem is bound to get lots of traction.

DoubleU said...

You don't have to burn books when everything is digital, they just "disappear"

DoubleU said...

Don't forget that Google is busy digitizing a lot of works.

Once you control the information, you control the people.

pdwalker said...

see The Right To Read by Richard Stallman

rockville said...

You can still find 1984 and the rest of Orwell's works here. For free.

Alear said...

I just turned on my Kindle wifi for the first time since they deleted the books. I do use the Kindle daily, but it's so full of unread books that it's not uncommon to leave the wifi off for a week or more.

My copies of both 1984 and Animal Farm are still extant, even an hour after turning on the wifi. However, I'm quite sure I didn't pay a nickel for them. They are out of copyright and available for a free download elsewhere. Apparently Amazon is only deleting the copies bought from them, after the publisher complained.

Although Ayn Rand's "Anthem" has been available since Oct 2008, when I first looked, "Atlas Shrugged" was never offered. I looked, and even remember commenting to a friend that there's a lot of unavailable books, with that and "LoTR" specifically mentioned. (Bonus to me: I just verified both of those books. "Atlas" is still unavailable, but LoTR is now offered, at a very reasonble price. I just downloaded the free sample.)

Alear said...

I've done a bit of research. Follow this link to get a history of "Atlas Shrugged" comments on the Amazon boards. It seems that an illegal copy got uploaded, and was deleted once caught by Amazon.

K-nine said...

All I can offer is that my story is not anecdotal, but first hand. I know what I saw and I know what the Amazon response was.

What I really want to see is evidence that even one single liberal or non-conservative title has been treated this way. That and that alone will put my conspiracy thoery to rest.

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