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.
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.”
I'd add something, but really what more can you say...?
(H/t TPM)
2 comments:
ironic that it was orwell. but as juicy as this tale is..
i read on one of the kindle blogs that the publisher's agreement with amazon provided for the last-minute change-of-heart, and included the requirement that it be deleted and readers refunded, should the publisher decide to invoke the provision.
of course, amazon may learn from this that grief of this nature costs them more money than they can make if publishers keep doing sh!t that makes them give $ back to their customers.
also: amazon cannot touch customers' kindles. amazon deleted the item from purchasers' accounts in 'the cloud', and when those customers sync'ed with the server, the book went away from their devices. in theory, if one had a backup copy on one's hard drive, one could still read the book, and just not sync until done.
it's wrinkly new tech. there was recently a huge scandal -- a big ol' customer snit -- that was shouted down by the majority of people on the kindle boards when the same thing happened with 'atlas shrugged' and 'the fountainhead'. because those were bootlegs. it seems that amazon's process is extremely automated. no idea how they'll be able to vet author content to prevent that.
but amazon's big, and has $. lots of people and companies are vulturing around hoping they'll be able to sue.
i'm not uncritical. i hate amazon's business model w/r/t kindle.
but damn, do i love the device. if anything, i love it more now than i did the day it showed up on the doorstep.
sincerely,
thorn
The Amazon guys are quoted on Endgadget as promising not to do this again:
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These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.
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I get why they did what they did - I just think yankback is bogus. I mean, if I buy a book at Borders that turns out to be involved in a rights dispute with the original author - I still get to keep the book.
Electronic delivery is going to allow all manner of shenanigans and I'm hoping they get ironed out early with a customer bias.
The last thing consumers need these days is yet another arena where all the decisions favor the vendor.
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