Amazon Parents Who Vowed Tonight Would Be Last Night Again
Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
In George Orwell's "1984," regime censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Large Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the "retentiveness pigsty."
On Fri, it was "1984" and another Orwell volume, "Animate being Farm," that were dropped downwards the retentiveness hole — by Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an due east-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a visitor that did non have rights to them, using a self-service function. "When we were notified of this past the rights holder, nosotros removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers," he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad thought. "We are irresolute our systems so that in the time to come we will non remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances," Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to information technology over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and plain to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of "1984" from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was nonetheless available on the Kindle store Fri night, but there was no such version of "Brute Farm."
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. "Of all the books to recall," said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of "1984" for 99 cents concluding month. "I never imagined that Amazon really had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased."
Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of "1984" appeared to be a browse of a paper edition of the book. "If this Kindle breaks, I won't buy a new one, that's for sure," he said.
Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Spider web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over like bug.
Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to requite the visitor the right to delete purchases afterward they have been fabricated. Information technology says Amazon grants customers the correct to keep a "permanent re-create of the applicable digital content."
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer'southward habitation to have back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged information technology turns out to exist. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
"It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an eastward-book from Amazon," said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officeholder for British Telecom and an expert on reckoner security and commerce. "As a Kindle owner, I'm frustrated. I tin't lend people books and I can't sell books that I've already read, and now it turns out that I can't fifty-fifty count on even so having my books tomorrow."
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading "1984" on his Kindle for a summertime assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. "They didn't simply take a book back, they stole my work," he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a retentivity hole. While the copyright on "1984" will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Spider web sites in those countries offering digital copies of the book free to all comers.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
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