Amazons ironic Big Brother move in 09

[Vater Araignee]

July 17, 2009, 12:57 pm

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

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.

The MobileReference editions these novels wher deleted from Kindle e-book readers by Amazon.com.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering electronic editions, 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.

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.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

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.”

Scary.

That shows that even on the internet something can get shoved down the memory hole.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

Interesting aspect of is it would be near impossible to do with physical objects and is something that I can think of no parallel to in any previous era of history. Say they sold 5,000 copies of something and later decided for whatever reason they wanted to 'recall' it, good luck getting them back if the buyers want to keep them.