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Amazon remotely deletes books from the Kindle

beer good

beer good

Well-Known Member
Apparently, Amazon has withdrawn a bunch of titles from sale as Kindle e-books. Which means that not only can the books no longer be bought, but customers who have already bought and paid for the books have had them remotely deleted from their Kindles. The fact that the books affected are Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm is obviously just a coincidence, but a fitting one.

Honestly, is anyone surprised?

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com

Amazon remotely deletes Orwell e-books from Kindles, unpersons reportedly unhappy (update)

Amazon Sends 1984 Down the Memory Hole : TreeHugger

Yes, my real books are bulky and environmentally unfriendly. Yes, it becomes a problem if for some reason I want to lug around 50 of them at the same time. But at least once I buy them, I own them and the publisher can't push a button half a world away and remove them from my, and everyone else's, bookshelf.
 
I haven't read about the Kindle, but just did a quick Google and see that it has web access which is why I guess Amazon could remotely delete the books. Thats pretty terrible behaviour.

I still stand by my Sony E-reader, though. I think there is room for both E-books and traditional books.
 
To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what can be done on the Sony Reader or other non-Kindle devices; I expect it depends on what sort of DRM is on the books you've bought. They cannot do a remote wipe of the books themselves on a Sony, but I can't swear that it's impossible for publishers to recall the DRM key and thus make the books unreadable if they want to.

Still, the real issue here is who owns the books you buy. When you buy a real book, you own it, and its yours to do with as you please for as long as you please. When you buy an e-book, do you own it or do you simply pay for access to a service, which only exists as long as the publisher feels like offering it?
 
beer good said:
Still, the real issue here is who owns the books you buy. When you buy a real book, you own it, and its yours to do with as you please for as long as you please. When you buy an e-book, do you own it or do you simply pay for access to a service, which only exists as long as the publisher feels like offering it?
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I agree, I'm just going to take a look at the conditions they put on the book when you download it for the Sony E-reader to see what it says...
 
Can't find it at the moment. I will need to buy an e-book to see what it says. Oh dear what a shame ;-)

I am willing to make this major sacrifice for the good of the community. :D
 
I was just going to post this story.

I have added one more item to my reasons not to buy a Kindle list.
 
I can't imagine that outraged customer screeching will lag far behind, with demands for restitution - maybe two-for-one as a punitive demand. Who knows, maybe a law suit or several thrown in for good measure, for psychic trauma perhaps, or misleading advertising at the least. Possibly even a Federal investigation and maybe even Senatorial Hearings for restraint of interstate trade. This could be bigger than the Baseball Hearings. And might get even the full Oprah treatment. This could be big stuff. :whistling:
 
Peder said:
I can't imagine that outraged customer screeching will lag far behind, with demands for restitution - maybe two-for-one as a punitive demand. Who knows, maybe a law suit or several thrown in for good measure, for psychic trauma perhaps, or misleading advertising at the least. Possibly even a Federal investigation and maybe even Senatorial Hearings for restraint of interstate trade. This could be bigger than the Baseball Hearings. And might get even the full Oprah treatment. This could be big stuff. :whistling:
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The NY Times article says that the affected people were refunded so I dunno where you were going with the restitution comment.

I do like this quote from the one article beer good posted:

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.
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i havent read through all the posts in the thread, but i just wanted to say, amazon sucks- go to borders ^_^
 
sparkchaser said:
The NY Times article says that the affected people were refunded so I dunno where you were going with the restitution comment.
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Just musing out loud, Sparky, and none too seriously. But, hypothetically, perhaps money does not salve all wounds and someone actually wanted the books. Hard to believe I know, but imaginable in some wild world, at least to me. BG of course has the more sober take on the matter, as has been noted.
But my own generally favorable views on Kindle are not much changed.
Cheers,
Have a happy day :flowers:
 
Amazon was in a tough pickle on this one. I can't remember where, but I read that they utilized a source for the book that didn't the rights to it. As the one who helped dole it out, they were caught in the middle. They should've paid the rightful owners of the work and let the people keep the material on their kindles. Instead, they sold out the consumer and passed the buck on the issue. I loved the following analogy in the article mentioned by beer good.


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.
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SFG, that of course would be actually criminal behavior -- burglary at the least, with breaking and entering as well -- so it sounds to me like the kind of inflamed thinking on the matter that I was commenting on. :cool:

I thought that we who supped with the electronic Devil had already learned to use a long spoon.
 
UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh's analysis on this: More on Amazon's Deleting Books from Customers' Kindles

Volokh goes into detail about copyright infringement and Amazon's responsibilities but perhaps the most interesting tidbit out of that article has nothing to do with copyright infringement:

Nor does it seem to me that Amazon can defend itself on the grounds that it was exercising its contractual rights to delete infringing material. As I read its Kindle License Agreement, it has not reserved any such rights. Rather, it says (emphasis added), "Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use."

Even if Amazon had reserved such a right under its contract, I think that would have been something that many readers would have found quite troubling, especially given that the reservation of this right would have been unexpected, contrary to the way things are done with traditional books, and put somewhere inside an agreement that no-one reads. The contractual term might have been enforceable, but still understandably upsetting to readers. But as best I can tell, no such right was reserved; in fact, the deletion was a breach of its contract, and quite possibly a trespass on readers' Kindles.
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Here is a slightly more updated New York Times article on the subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/t...l=1&adxnnlx=1247940001-OddjEm/R26ac5zs6rOnJ1Q

Blurb:

Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
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They're refunding the purchase price so I guess that makes doing OK with them. As for the how they are doing it, they have the ability to remotely tinker with your Kindle.
 
Granted I don't know the capabilities of a Kindle, but according to Wiki, the newest one supports PDF files, and is able to be used on iPhones. Doesn't that imply that something other than Amazon-based items have at least the capability of being held on the Kindle/iPhone/iPod?

And would that not also give Amazon access to whatever is held in those files?

How can that not constitute invasion of privacy?

Amazon Kindle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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