Amazon Deletes a user's Kindle Books Without Consent
If you ever needed another reason not to purchase hardware, software or media with DRM then this latest story may convince you that DRM is utterly bad for consumers in general.
Amazon Kindle owners who purchased books by George Orwell just realized yesterday that the books were no longer on their device. Amazon apparently deleted the books from user devices remotely because the publisher of the book decided to no longer offer electronic versions of the books for the device.
Customers who have bought the books did receive a refund but were left puzzled and confused. Anyone who thought that ebooks with DRM were just like book purchases may have realized that they are not at all as Amazon and the publishers seem to have the power to remove books at any time from user devices. Amazon responded to user questions with the following paragraph:
The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occurred, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.
Customers thinking about purchasing a Kindle or any other electronic device that is making use of DRM may want to consider selecting DRM-free alternatives instead as they provide them with more control over the contents on the device. It's better for them, their children and our future.
Amazon, basically, has a kill switch that it can use to remove contents purchased on the site in digital form. That's quite the scary option the company has at its disposal, but it is far from the only company that has these powers.
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Reminds me of the book “Fahrenheit 451” where Fireman walk from door to door burning books. Their work would be a lot easier using the delete feature that amazon offers :-)
This has written “censorship” all over…
News seem to focus on 1984 irony but this was not censorship act as far as I understand, merely copyright screwup.
As for situation overall – I only wonder how many more it will take to teach people at last to not touch anything with DRM on it. Ever.
Actually, several news services are reporting that the reason the books were pulled was because the books loaded on the self pub platform lacked the proper copyright from the self publisher.
OK boys. You can stand down the black helicopters.
Six months ago bloggers (notably Stephanie at UrbZen) warned about this kind of thing.
See:
http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/kindle-see-we-told-you-so/
Re: In response to Amazon’s remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm
Hi there,
Saw you’d written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be
interested in the petition we launched yesterday:
http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984
We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig,
Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and
scholars.
The petition opens:
“We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which
books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon’s
are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon’s
use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear
threat to the free exchange of ideas.”
Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be
interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!
Thanks,
-Holmes Wilson
Free Software Foundation