Hey I paid for that!
July 18th, 2009 by Brad HeapInteresting post on the New York Times blog site: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/
It turns out that when you buy an ebook through Amazon’s new Kindle ebook reader you actually don’t really buy it and furthermore at a later date they can decide to remotely delete it off the mobile device.
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.
I suppose that it is a good thing that the accounts were credited. But to just go onto someones mobile device and delete things. Now that is scary. What other data do they have access too?
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.
You can’t resell or donate them, but Amazon can unsell them and delete them without your permission.
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.
And ironic. But this brings up a more pressing issue. What happens if someone does something or releases something really controversial say an Album or Book no longer can you be one of the few in possession of the item because it can be removed from you. What happens when the government decides to censor our books or music, could they delete all our iTunes files overnight in secret?
