Well, Citizens, it happened. Somebody at Amazon pulled a Big Brother by blowing two George Orwell novels off everyone’s Kindle without a word of explanation. The classic authoritarian move was doubly surreal in that one of the books to disappear was 1984, the very novel that invented Big Brother.
No one should say they couldn’t see this coming. I blogged about it here over a year and a half ago. I had read Cory Doctorow’s post; he had read Mark Pilgrim’s (Pilgrim was one of the first to sound the alarm).
In a time like ours, when information goes obsolete in mere nanoseconds, it’s a little scary that each of these warnings could have been written last week. This post, by Cade Metz is from 3 days ago, and sums up some of the issues, as well as the human impact of Amazon’s act of mass home invasion, digital style. Here’s a sample:
Multiple Kindle owners made the same complaint: that Amazon was less than upfront about the removals. “What ticked me off is that I got a refund out of the blue and my book just disappeared out of my archive,” wrote another victim. “I emailed Amazon for an answer as to what was going on and they said there was a ‘problem’ with the book, nothing more specific. I’m sorry, when you delete my private property – refund or not – without my permission, I expect a better explanation than that.”
Kindle owners, how does this make you feel about your Kindle?
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I don’t own a Kindle, and this sure doesn’t make me want one. I want to be able to put anything I want on my ereader, which is why I use my iphone. And if I do put something on it, I sure as heck don’t want someone else taking it off, ESPECIALLY if I’ve paid for it. Refund or not.
Total agreement on all points. I want more choice, not less. More later in the week when I blog about the B&N “good guy” alternative ebook plan.
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