Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Brad Stone, The New York Times
17 July 2009
Lucas Jackson / Reuters A commuter using an Amazon Kindle while riding the subway in New
York.
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news
articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an
incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down
the memory hole — by
Amazon.com.
In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique,
Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the
Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the
books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have
rights to them, using a self-service function. “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,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We
are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books
from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a
digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the
company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.
Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless
network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic
books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.
An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store
Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”
People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with
indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all
the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a
sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of
“1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually
had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something
that I had already purchased.”
Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed
that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper
edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one,
that’s for sure,” he said.
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.
“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from
Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for
British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a
Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t
sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t
even count on still having my books tomorrow.”
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading
“1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and
annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back,
they stole my work,” he said.
On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole.
While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United
States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada,
Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies
of the book free to all comers.
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