Kindle- Orwell's Books Recalled By Amazon

Kindle- Orwell's Books Recalled By Amazon

blogs.wsj.com

On Thursday, some Amazon.com customers discovered that e-books they had bought by George Orwell had disappeared from their Kindle e-readers.

It wasn’t a scene from Orwell’s dystopian classic, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” The customers reported on Amazon’s discussion boards that Amazon refunded them the cost of that book as well “Animal Farm,” and used its “Whispernet” wireless access to their Kindles to wipe away the e-books. Some were surprised and upset, to put it mildly.

The issue, says Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener, is that the Orwell books had been added to the company

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Books in the real world are covered by a notion of copyright called the “first sale” doctrine, which allows a purchaser to do pretty much whatever he or she wants with the book–including reselling it or lending it to a friend.

But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules

I never thought of digitalizing printed text as bad in anyway, but this changed my mind. If books somehow becomes extinct one day and only digital copies remain, the government can erase all copies of a book with a single button?

Tell me this is not true.

blogs.wsj.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 7/19/2009 by die_another_day]

This is horrible! Book burning almost. I worry that eventually all books will be digital and only "approved" books will be available. Wont happen anytime soon but I think it will eventually, and thats a scary thought!

Peace!

The only reason this book was pulled was because it was distributed illegally. the publisher who had put it on the Kindle platform didn't have the rights to it. This has happened a few times in the past with books that were distributed illegally (most notably the Twilight series).

I don't see this as an issue. If I bought a piece of stolen property, regardless of whether or not I knew it was stolen I would be expected to return it, and I wouldn't even be entitled to get my money back. This is no different, except Amazon refunded the purchase price.

edit to say that due to the lash back of this, Amazon has stated that they won't recall books like this anymore.

[edit on 7/19/2009 by LiquidLight]