Amazon Offers To Return Pulled Orwell Ebooks 256
Back in July, Amazon faced public outrage over their decision to delete ebook copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of customers who purchased them. Shortly thereafter, CEO Jeff Bezos offered an apology, acknowledging that Amazon handled the situation in a "stupid" and "thoughtless" manner. Now, they're offering something more substantial: anyone who had an ebook deleted can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact. Any customer who isn't interested in a new copy can get either an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30.
Annotations?? (Score:5, Interesting)
... can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact.
Wait a second-- where are these annotations coming from? When they erased the text of the books from Kindles, they didn't erase the annotations, but apparently archived them somewhere?
Does this imply that Amazon can remotely access (and read?) any private notes anybody makes using their Kindle?
Scary that they can restore the annotations. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:damage (Score:5, Interesting)
How else would you explain the 2 month time period that elapsed before a decision was made?
Both very large companies I have worked for in the past corrected decisions that affected the customer in hours, not months. When you do something hilariously stupid, you fix it immediately and ponder the ramifications later. That's just good business.
Re:damage (Score:4, Interesting)
Something else that's been bugging me is the offer regarding user annotations. Are those supposed to be stored elsewhere because if they aren't amazon just gave away that they don't just have a killswitch but also keep watch on what you do with the kindle.
The real reason they probably did it (Score:4, Interesting)
It was coming to bite them in the a**... with a student [cnet.com] suing them and everything.
They finally realized they were getting widespread negative publicity, poorer reviews, more people recommending to stay away frmo kindle and get something else, and maybe, just maybe, it put a small dent in their sales.
Enough for them to stand up and take notice...
If it were just a few customers effected by the deletion and hasn't been widely publicized in the news, I have my doubts that Amazon would have ever done something to right the situation.
Re:damage (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that the annotations are stored seperately and could indeed be accessed after the book dissapeared. The trouble is without the context provided by the exact version of the book they are meant to go with the annotations lose a lot of thier meaning.
So if amazon has restored the exact version of the book they killed then I don't see the annotations regaining thier context as too serious.
Re:Nice gesture, but that's not what worries me (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the first problem is that while the government can (legally) do many things (from taking your goods to killing people) Amazon can't . After they sold you the stolen or fake or infringing or whatever goods they can't (legally) just reach to your computer/kindle and "correct" the mistake by helping themselves just because this is the way they designed the system.
Plus I'm sick and tired of this DRM double dipping. Copyright gives rights not only to authors but also to customers AND all other people. With DRM authors are giving themselves technologically rights they don't have legally. Copyright owners don't have the legal right to stop you from selling your music collection. They don't have the right to take back what they sold to you. They don't have the right to prevent you from playing your US DVD in Europe. They don't have the right to forbid you to take small parts to use them in a research work (fair use). They don't have the right to kill your collection because they don't think maintaining the authentication servers is profitable for them (yes, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wallmart I'm looking at you). And above all they don't have the right to keep their creations from falling into public domain (although they are very close to their desired "forever less one day" in extending the copyright terms).
Not that there's any chance in hell for this to happen but I vote to have any (legal) copyright protection removed for any material that has DRM. You, author, want to break the deal with customers and with general public by not giving them all the rights they have (via technological means). FINE. There's no deal then. No (legal) copyright protection for whatever DRMed crap you sell.
Soooooo... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nice, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course not, it would be bad for business if they did that.
George Orwell books like "1984" and "Animal Farm" deserve to be deleted because they cannot have customers drawing parallels from the books to their business model or even the way modern governments are run. But it was just a coincidence that those two books happened to be pulled and deleted.
Amazon.com got caught and had to backpeddle and do some Public Relations and offer to restore the books or at least offer a discount.
Anything to get people to forget that it is a DRM device with a backdoor in it to delete any book or file purchased from their store if the owners of the book or media decide to pull it from the market.
After all Kindle owners weren't really using those rights and freedoms anyway, and now they have learned to love Amazon.com and the Kindle device that watches them as they read books and deletes any book for whatever reason.
Me, I don't use Kindle devices for that reason, but I'm a crazy guy who cares about my rights and freedoms and expects that if I bought something not only do I legally own it, but the owner of the IP and company that sold it to me shouldn't be able to take it away from me. Silly me, and my paranoid rantings that consumers actually own what they buy and it shouldn't have a kill-switch on it to remove it.
Too late... (Score:2, Interesting)
Then they started to delete Orwell books and for me, a world broke down. Do you know this feeling, when you figure out, that a good friend of you has been lying to you? Well, that's how this digital book burning felt to me. It completely destroyed my trust in that company. And since amazon was my most trusted company, I now no longer trust any other company with ultimate online access to my devices.
So, instead of buying a kindle I bought a simple chinese ereader without web access. Sure, it's not as pretty as a kindle, it has no wikipedia access and the poor translation of the manual starts with "For safely and efficiently use the product, please strictly abide by the rules, otherwise the danger will happen" but at least I know that nobody can take my ebooks away from me.
Re:The lesson here is. (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the key for me; rapid exchange of ideas is leading to a global increase in consciousness; this makes us more difficult to subdue/control - therefore, an all-out attack on sharing under one guise or another.
Re:damage (Score:2, Interesting)
How is paper copy a better option in that regard than, say, drm-free pdf copy?