Amazon Acts as Thought Police, Deletes 1984 From Kindles

A few days ago owners of the popular e-reading device the Kindle woke up to find that certain digital editions of George Orwell’s book “1984” and “Animal Farm” were inexplicably deleted from their devices by Amazon. Many questioned the reasons behind Amazon’s move to remotely delete digital editions from their devices, among those questions. Why?

Amazon is Watching You!

Many are already calling it the digital equivalent to having someone sneaking into your bedroom at night and stealing books from your bookshelf (which in real life would almost certainly never happen). Some have even gone as far as calling it one of the future consequences of digital publishing.

“Amazon says the Kindle versions of all these books were illegal. Someone uploaded bootlegged copies using the Kindle Store’s self-publishing system, and Amazon was only trying to look after publishers’ intellectual property,” says Farhad Manjoo, a columnist for Slate Magazine, “The Orwell incident was too rich with irony to escape criticism, however. Amazon was forced to promise that it will no longer delete its customers’ books.”

Despite the fact that the digital editions were illegal printings of Orwell’s novels, many customers were outraged because even if customers purchased boot-legged copies of the edition, a publisher has no right to ask that it be returned once money exchanges hands. After the ensuing uproar died down (due to a slew of articles being published on practically every major publishing site on the internet) customers were given a full refund.

Today, CEO Jeff Bezos extended the apology to members of the Kindle forum:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Now far be it for me to let this turn into a rant, but Amazon had absolutely no right to delete people’s edition remotely and could have handled this much better. Because it was 1984, one has to question if this is the future of digital publishing as we know it, where e-books can be changed remotely and deleted on at a moments notice.

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