That Book Does Not Exist
Welcome to the brave new world of digital publishing…
Amazon Removes E-Books From Kindle Store, Revokes Ownership
Today, Amazon removed George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book store. The company also went ahead and removed any digital trace of the books, too-striking them from both users’ digital lockers and from Kindle devices.
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This unusual maneuver, which Amazon says occurred because Orwell’s publisher changed its mind about offering the electronic version of these titles, is all the more unsettling simply because readers already purchased the books and had their ownership of the item revoked. In the Orwell book case, the item was simply no longer there-it was as if those Kindle users never owned it.
What book citizen? That book does not exist. That book never existed…
July 18th, 2009 at 12:04 am
It turns out that the reason they pulled it was because it was being distributed illegally.
July 19th, 2009 at 12:11 am
Irony is beautiful. *sigh*
Any word if those who purchased the e-books were refunded? I would think they’d have an e-receipt, if only via email.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:19 am
It turns out that the reason they pulled it was because it was being distributed illegally…
But of course, any book that has had its authorization revoked, is by definition an illegal copy. See how that works?
Whether or not MobileReference did or did not have the rights to publish 1984 isn’t the point. Look at how easy, how beautifully simple it is in proprietary locked down DRM’ed environments to disappear something. Book burning is so yesterday…
Any word if those who purchased the e-books were refunded?
They got refunds. I read at least one poor student who was writing a paper on 1984 lost all his annotations. So apparently your annotations become attached to the book in such a way that when the book is disappeared, so are they.