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.
…
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.”
35 more years until “1984” enters the public domain!
I want a Kindle so bad I an taste it. But, I’m waiting to see what PlasticLogic comes out with (soon?) so I can read PDfs and other formats.
As for the iPhone? Sheesh! My reading glasses need reading glasses to get through a newspaper on one of those screens…
I do buy ebooks in RTF format. They work on all my computers. Even my little net book has a 10 inch screen and I’ve got a 9 cell battery pack. I do have to plug it in more often but it costs about the same and is rather more flexible.
I got to use a kindle. I’m still mystified why this is considered better than a book.
So it was an unauthorized version? Does this mean Amazon is picking up books on public-domain sites like gutenberg.au (which uses a different copyright law system and, yes, has all Orwell’s works available for free), reformatting them for Kindle, then SELLING them? That would explain the sudden “oops, we can’t sell this unauthorized version in the US” realization, and the seemingly sneaky removal in the middle of the night.
What a rip.
On further thought, Amazon sells books via subcontractors as well in an automated vendor system. Maybe what happened is one of these vendors scarfed up the gutenberg.au books, formatted them nicely, and put them up for sale w/o permission, knowingly or unknowingly.
In that case, then, Amazon should not have removed the books from Kindles. Instead, they should have replaced that unauthorized version with the correct, legal version THAT THEY STILL SELL on Amazon. 1984 is one of their featured Kindle titles, for $9.99. Sure, they would have had to pay the license cost to the publisher — but they should also have taken precautions with their vendors to ensure books sold via Amazon, using Amazon’s good name and resources, were legally the vendors’ to sell. They should make good and offer these customers a new copy of the deleted books for free.
Dude… I have a Kindle (gen 2). I bought 1984 a few weeks ago and have been reading it off and on, along with several other books. I had no idea this had happened until I read it here.
So I grabbed the Kindle and took a look… it’s gone. No announcement, no explanation, no warning, no nothing, just… gone. So, if I hadn’t read about it here, I’d be wondering what the hell happened to the book I bought… or thought I’d bought, but… maybe I didn’t, maybe it never really happened, I only imagined it did…
In other words, 1984 went down the freakin’ memory hole!
Geez, Orwell, how can you even sleep at night now!? >:-(
We will soon need to re-define the words “buy” and “own”
@iskander
In the New World Order YOU are the property.
In Capitalist America the Book orders YOU!
Amazon IS going to feel the heat. Their the ones that advertised and sold the goods. That’s what most customers will come back to complain to. The publisher is probably just laughing at the whole thing 🙂
Seriously, would you complain to Amazon or the publisher? And who will you most likely get a response from and in return allow you to rant and vent? AMAZON 😀
Yawn.
When you finish with the “maybes” and “what-ifs”, read this:
http://tinyurl.com/mwdasg
It was done poorly – at the request of the publisher.