Amazon Deletes George Orwell From Kindle!!!
- Erasmus_Folly
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Amazon Deletes George Orwell From Kindle!!!
If you thought you owned the works you purchased for your Kindle you were wrong.
Here is the link to the story from today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/techn ... mazon.html
This practice is shameful in the extreme.
Comments anyone?
- Scott
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So one could make the argument that what happened is similar to if someone sells you a stolen purse, in that you never actually owned the purse and maybe the purse needs to be taken back and you refunded the money you spent. Either way, it's a tricky situation.
"Non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco." Virgil, The Aeneid
- The Mythwriter
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- Fran
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No.
I do not have a reading device. I do not want a reading device. I will stick to books. I will amass so many of them that if a day comes that we move into a world that is a bastardized child of Orwell and Bradburys’ nightmares, they will have to burn down my whole house just to be rid of them.
“Each time your hand is slapped the sting of shock lessens but the expectation of punishment grows and you learn not to reach at all.” All hail Pavlov.
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Amazon effectively acknowledged 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,” 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 it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal 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People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved.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 last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually 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 scan of a paper edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.
- Zannie
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- RobertM
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Okay...but then Amazon is supposed to check that statement BEFORE they authorize the book for release, and frankly, with an Orwell book they should have caught that. The publisher's Amazon Kindle Publishing account was probably deleted, and one or two folks in Quality Control probably got called on the carpet.
What Amazon SHOULD Have Done: Deleted the books from the Kindles and replaced them with FREE versions of the authorized editions from the REAL publishers...and then paid off the real publishers their royalties for every phony copy that was sold. Either that, or issue a credit to the customers equal to the amount they would need to replace the removed books.
It was Amazon who screwed up by letting those illegal copies hit their website for sale. So...it should be Amazon who pays the price. That's my opinion, anyway.
- sybil1reader
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Fran wrote:That's scarily Orwellian ... I'll stick with the old fashioned paperbacks?
The irony kind of eases my chagrin. In the end, I think the people we need to blame are the ones who are pirating the books. I agree with those of you who say that Amazon should have notified Kindle users earlier, though. They have to do what they have to do, but they can save themselves a lot of bad press and their customers a lot of confusion by communicating their actions and the reasons for them in a timely manner.
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Yes, yes it is...Fran wrote:That's scarily Orwellian ... I'll stick with the old fashioned paperbacks?
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