Amazon Secretly Removes “1984” From the KindleForewarned is forearmed.
Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.
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Regardless of whether you believe Amazon's promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you're reading and when - and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?
Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer - hopefully a computer that isn't connected to the internet
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Digital Censorship At Amazon
Surreal, but not totally unexpected (hat tip to Bloviating Zeppelin):
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11 comments:
This has happened before. You "buy" a book through Kindle you do not own it. Ever. It is just a very expensive loan library with a casual return policy.
iTunes stole all my music.
THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF MUSIC.
I fucking hate iTunes.
It's the same thing with Amazon.
iTunes stole all my music.
THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF MUSIC.
I fucking hate iTunes.
It's the same thing with Amazon.
By the way, the iTunes music, THAT'S THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS OF MUSIC I BOUGHT FROM APPLE ITUNES.
I PAID FOR IT.
THEY STOLE IT.
THAT'S THE END OF MY BUSINESS WITH THEM.
I never trusted the e-book concept to not post-edit books from the print version. I do purchase books (hard copies and books on tape/disc)from Amazon. Given Amazon retains a history of the selections I purchase online as well as the shipping addresses for myself and gift recipients, any question about 'privacy issues' is obliterated as well. Modern technology has it's drawbacks.
I hate e-books anyway. Just not the same as real books. If I'm reading I want to be away from any kind of "screen". I don't do reading on screens. That just plain sucks. And all those fake "page turns". Yeah, just animating a page turn doesn't really make it "like the real deal".
Nicoenarg
From the small print:
“All the books on your Kindle are not yours. They belong to Amazon. All that cash you have paid was simply to access these books on your Kindle. You have not paid to own the books…”
BZ
I never liked the e-book concept, and told my family never to give me a Kindle. As Annonymous said I like the real deal.
Pastorius,
What happened with iTunes, that you "lost" all those tunes?
I have two Kindles -- one a gift and the other which I bought (Kindle Fire). I definitely prefer real books. However, some books are available only in digital format; one such book is The Hoosier Schoolmaster.
I Only have ONE RESPONSE TO THAT ...
THIS
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