Word came this week that Amazon.com had very quickly and quietly, via their "WhisperNet" technology (which, incidentally, brings to mind Terminator's SkyNet), deleted George Orwell's classics 1984 and Animal Farm from both the Kindle marketplace and from every Kindle that had ever purchased them, refunding the money to the Kindle's owners.
The irony, of course, is that 1984 is about a fascist media state and their constant alteration of history by changing digital records of what has occurred.
The hard part here is that Amazon's mass e-book removal was necessary due to copyright infringement. Whoever had first uploaded those books to Amazon's Kindle store and started selling them didn't actually own the rights to them. When Orwell's estate found out, down they had to come.
Amazon certainly could have handled it a bit better, I think. io9 points out that what they did flies in the face of what you expect to happen when you purchase a book (i.e. that it's a physically thing that cannot be forcibly taken from you). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the fall yesterday, and Amazon.com claims that they will not revoke books from customers "in this circumstance" again.
I don't know. This spells trouble for e-book readers if you ask me. No e-book or piece of e-information will ever be yours unless you can get it onto a device that is not connected to the internet. 1984 came and went a long time ago, after all.
KAB




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