This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, 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.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
As one of my readers noted, 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.
You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
Scary.
Scary indeed! This is exactly the wrong sort of thing for Amazon to do, both ethically and from a business stand point. I can perfectly understand no longer selling a book, but to go into user's Kindles and actively delete it without their permission? That is just wrong on so many levels.
Here is a NYT article with more details.
More thoughts here.
Fortunately, the Kindle is about to get some competition which will hopefully help limit such draconian behavior.
3 comments:
Terrible! I suppose they must have a cryptic clause in the contract somewhere about doing this, but it is still horrible.
Probably going to cost Amazon dearly...
I can't even imagine how correct Ali is.
And, I'm sorry, the publisher 'changed its mind'?? What kind of shit contracts do your lawyers write up, Amazon?
Aside: there's a great advantage of jailbreaking your iphone--you can turn *off* apple's 'killswitch,' the thing that would do exactly this on your phone.
Given that the publishers seem to have all the clout, it will be interesting to see if Barnes and Noble operates any differently.
If B&N is smart, they will display and sell their eBook reader at all of their stores. There's no doubt that one limiting factor for the Kindle is that the vast majority of buyers cannot see or hold one before buying it. Imagine how many more people would buy a good eBook reader if they could just try it out in person. B&N, unlike Amazon, has the brick and mortar stores to make that happen.
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