Digital book burning is happening now!

SAN FRANCISCO — Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell’s “1984” were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices.

Jeffrey Bezos, chief of Amazon, apologized last week for the digital deletion of a book from its Kindle reading devices after a copyright dispute.
Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon’s “ ‘solution’ to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”

An apology was not enough for many people.

A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.

“As long as Amazon maintains control of the device it will have this ability to remove books and that means they will be tempted to use it or they will be forced to it,” said Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation.

The foundation, based in Boston, is soliciting signatures from librarians, publishers and major authors and public intellectuals. This week it plans to present a petition to Amazon asking it to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles, and to reconsider its use of the software called digital rights management, or D.R.M. The software allows the company to maintain strict control over the copies of electronic books on its reader and also prevents other companies from selling material for the device.

Two years after Amazon first introduced the Kindle and lighted a fire under the e-books market, there is increasing awareness of how traditional libraries of paper and ink differ from those made of bits and bytes. The D.R.M. in Amazon’s Kindle books, backed up by license agreements with copyright holders, prevents customers from copying or reselling Kindle books — the legal right of “first sale” that is guaranteed to owners of regular books.

I emplore you to read the entire article here

This has honest and un biased implications tied closely to Nazi book burning. Amazon is truly trying to bring knowledge to the people and is being opposed by every stone in the road.

The information age is not supposed to be limited to TPTB. The information age is about the public, the people, about free flowing knowledge between people from all nations, religions and races.

This president if allowed to endure is the first step towards information dictation and modern day book burning. Lift up your voices ATS, say no to digital book burning!

Its really not as bad as it sounds, here is the full story and actually what happened. No burning of books im afraid.

THE US PRESS thought it had a really good bit of irony on its hands after Amazon moved to delete 1984 and Animal Farm from its database of books. Copies of the two George Orwell novels were sold to Kindle owners on behalf of an independent publisher. Most of the world's press were furious. After all, is not 1984 all about free speech? Who is this Amazon which can digitally burn books? However according to Cnet, if anyone had done the slightest research they would have discovered that the books had been published illegally. 1984 is still under copyright protection in the US and therefore can't be printed by anyone, although it is public domain in Canada, Australia, and other countries.

Full Article

reply to post by refuse_orders


You don't see the vision at hand. Traditional places we "rent" books from are going to become extint very soon my friend. Perhaps you haven't noticed but major newspapers all across the country are going bankrupt.

People get there news and there social reality from the internet these days. Digital books are the staple of the future, it cuts costs by a very large amount for education across the board.

Major players such as Borders and other major suppliers are now looking into becoming suppliers of media outlets that support updated and purchased content as opposed to selling stagnant works that have long been obsolite.

Digital media is the fast becoming the way of the world and this is a first attempt of control of that media. Wake up and don't brush this off lightly because this is only the start.

reply to post by Helious


Great post, no doubt that digital media is the new format of the years to come, I seriously doubt that Borders or Amazon is going to be our champions of our 1st amendment rights.

This is truly a thought provoking subject though in that the thought of the goverment being able to rewrite history as they see fit with the stroke of a keyboard has vast implications and we may not be so far removed from that reality.

Bravo Hel, a post I actually agree with you on.

reply to post by Helious


I understand what your saying, don't get me wrong i am not arguing about the change over to digital media formats for books. In fact as somebody who purchases large amounts of books and e-books im all to well aware of the current shift in trends. The point i was trying to make was this was blown out of all proportion, i agree it highlights a good point about how easy it is to remove e-books from the public domain compared to hard/paper backs.

One of the big things you have to remember is digital files can be shared, i have hundreds upon hundreds of legitimately paid for e-books backed up on disk so its just like having a hardback or paperback copy.

They physically cant stop the sharing of formats such as .pdf, I have my tatty copy of 1984 that i have owned since my teens but I also have an e-book version i downloaded . Im not big on file sharing especially with literature but sure i will send the odd friend a copy of a e-book no different to me loaning them my actual book. Trust me if all of the major on-line retailers stopped the selling of 1984 for the purpose of censorship i will quite happily send people a copy free of charge, that would really screw people like Amazon over because they wont be making any profit because of their own stupidity and they failed to censor the material.

As for the decline in newspaper sales, yes the internet and mobile technology has had a huge impact on sales... More to the point though why would anyone bother buying news papers that are all bias, lie filled and owned by the same corporations when you have the ability to check hundreds of sources, reputable and not online?

In essence what im saying is no matter how hard they try to stop the flow of information they cant. This case though was just a mistake they tried to rectify to stop them ending up in legal disputes, i would do the same in that position.

[edit on 27/7/09 by refuse_orders]

[edit on 27/7/09 by refuse_orders]

reply to post by refuse_orders


Excelletnt post my friend and I am glad you see the shift to this format. And I also understand what you are saying about digital back up and the seeminly empty threat of them just depriving you the material through mainstream sources.

Consider for a moment that the same people who decide that the material is not legal or "fit" for download and public consumption also now have a digital trail on who reads what. This material is trackable in this way and can be hunted down through digital footprints.

Copy, clone or burning to a hard drive does not erase the the path that has be left to the netword from possesing such works to begin with. With that, the perps can be made known and the hard drives in question may be searched and confiscated.

reply to post by Helious


There are many precautions you can take to remove the "trail" encryption being the logical first step. If i was to send you an e-book in an encrypted format the trail goes cold as far as what is being shared. If enough copies were circulated to just a few sources who would then do the same it would be impossible for them to do anything.

Even changing the file type of a .pdf to .txt then send it and on receiving the file you simply change it back to .txt would work. Its essentially no harder than sharing anything else anonymously. Its often the simple methods like the second one they have no possible way of stopping.

Personally i know for a fact if 1984 was "banned", i would instantly start distributing as many copy's of the e-book as i possibly could using this method to those that wanted it. They couldn't prove a thing either...
Censorship is something i personally would feel obligated to fight in any way possible.