Amazon's Kindle in the News: Remote Deletion

Amazon's Kindle digital book reader is in the news. No surprise there. But in a moment of ultimate irony, Amazon has taken the egregious step of remotely deleting works by none other than George Orwell. One of the books… why, 1984, of course.

Is Jeff Bezos, in fact, Big Brother?

David Pogue says,

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.

Rest assured, those who were affected by this did have their money refunded. But they also learned the hard way what digital ownership really means: that e-book is yours until someone decides it isn't.

You have to give Amazon some credit: they were pulling copies of such works as 1984 and Animal Farm because a third-party, using Amazon's Digital Text Platform, uploaded the books when they did not have the rights to them. And, before you ask—no, it wasn't me. Amazon also said they would not remove works from customer Kindles should this happen again in the future.

While this incident doesn't lessen my desire to purchase a Kindle, it does serve as a remainder that DRM does, in fact, suck.