Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/

by KC8ZKF • 17 years ago

320 141 17 years ago

pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

Awesome irony. As a side point, I'm pretty pissy about this and it didn't even happen to me. Just because you can doesn't mean you have the right, and it doesn't mean you should. We used to use these publisher bastards to help us determine what to read since we didn't have an efficient way of establishing credibility.

Enter TEH T00Bz... We don't need these jack asses anymore. If I write anything, I'm going to e-publish.

frossie2• 17 years ago

I actually had to check it wasn't April 1st. Oh the irony indeed. On the plus side:

1. This might focus people's attentions on the problems of buying DRM books - I am still astonished how little it bothers people.

2. For the love of all your deities, can we please revisit copyright laws. The man has been dead for 59 years. Surely we can all agree those books should be public domain by now. Death+70 is just too long.

olefoo3• 17 years ago

Death plus 70 is just one instance of laws being purchased by special interests; and that is a tough problem.

derefr• 17 years ago

At this point, I'd actually accept a special "Disney gets to make money from Mickey Mouse forever" law in exchange for shorter copyrights for everything else.

CWuestefeld3• 17 years ago

I agree with the intent of what you said.

But I'd like to point out that the phrase "special interest" is very loaded. If you're going to use the phrase, can you differentiate between a "special interest" versus just a plain old regular interest?

It seems that people use "special interest" to denote interests with which they disagree. Those entities that they agree with are overlooked, despite the fact that all entities manifestly have their own interests.

(I hesitate to cite specific examples for fear of forking out an off-topic thread for an OP that's already marginal)

umjames• 17 years ago

I agree about DRM on books being bad. That's what I love about Pragmatic Programmers' e-books, I can get a plain PDF that I can read on any device that can read it.

sailormoon7• 17 years ago

Yeah, but the problem with that is that with PDF the page layout is really set in stone. What's appropriate for a 24" monitor may not be appropriate to read on your phone, or netbook, or what not.

The best format, IMO, is plain HTML. It can come with a custom style sheet, or can be overridden to taste on the client. It can be read by anything, it can be endlessly adapted .. it's just the best overall solution, IMO.

tdavis2• 17 years ago

I'm astonished by how little DRM bothers people in general. The idea that I can buy something and not own it at the same time is ridiculous. It'd be like buying a car and having it taken back in 5 years. We make a distinction between "buying" and "leasing" for a reason. Except on the Internet, where everybody tries to get you to buy things and apply leasing rules to what you just bought. It's completely asinine.

andreyf14• 17 years ago

It's not "leasing", either, though - unless they're indefinite-time leases for a fixed price, with the right to "withdraw" the lease for a full refund. Most leased cars are returned, I imagine. Most "DRM-bought" Kindle books are not.

So while "buy" isn't the right word, neither is "lease". It's a whole different beast altogether.

grandalf5• 17 years ago

Interesting. I'm always astonished by how much DRM does bother people.

If a song costs $0.99 with DRM then it would cost more without DRM. Very simple. In most cases the DRM terms of use are acceptable to me, which is why I don't hesitate to buy DRM'ed content.

Of course, many DRM implementations are highly annoying, but that is a design issue not a core issue with DRM technology.

pieceofpeace• 17 years ago

Legally, it's like Amazon brokered sale of stolen goods and the owners demanded those goods be returned. People thought they had purchased limited rights to the book. Amazon _is_ responsible in some way.

potatolicious4• 17 years ago

This has turned out to be overblown, as usual. More info here:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showAr...

Somebody (third-party) decided to sell 1984 and Animal Farm on the Kindle Store without owning the copyright to it. Amazon is of course forced to take down said illegal posting. The only questionable part here is whether or not they should be allowed to delete purchased copies (with refund).

olefoo3• 17 years ago

Thanks for finding that, it sounds like that story came out somewhat after the story had already blown up. The detail that it was due to a self-service publisher who did not own the copyright is crucial. It sounds like Amazon could save itself a lot of the PR grief that comes with this sort of thing by posting takedowns and C&Ds on chillingeffects.org like Google does.

j_baker• 17 years ago

Whether or not amazon is really at fault, this still shows a serious flaw in our Copyright law. The fact that:

1. Someone still has a copyright on this book. 2. That person can demand that everyone that bought a copy of it have their copy deleted.

...should prove that without question.

onreact-com• 17 years ago

That's why I prefer real paper based books. No book seller will break in my home at night and burn my copy even in case it was "illegal". ("Illegal books" reminds of me of the Nazis)

kragen4• 17 years ago

Suppose China decides that it is illegal to read 1984. Should Amazon delete any copies of 1984 found on Chinese Kindles?

yason• 17 years ago

But isn't the reason to maintain copyright on this particular dead man's work to help him make a good living and thus greatly increases his ability to contribute with even more creations? Oh. Oh, wait...

Tiktaalik• 17 years ago

hah wow.

strikes Kindle off "to buy" list

Skeuomorph• 17 years ago

Sony Reader allows you to categorize your materials, while amazingly, Kindle doesn't have any hierarchy, just a long list. As a bonus, the Sony Reader doesn't have wireless DRM to remotely delete your books. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

(I have both devices. The Sony is more usable while the Kindle DX handles full size business and engineering PDFs.)

evilneanderthal• 17 years ago

You know, I had a Sony mp3 player a while back. One day the music library software updated itself and installed DRM retroactively on the device and I could never change the music that was on it; I threw it out after I got tired of hearing the same 12 songs.

Yes, 12. 64mb storage =]

anatoly6• 17 years ago

You can use pdflrfwin to read full size PDFs on the Reader pretty comfortably. It can rotate the file landscape-wise, and cuts it into 2-3 chunks, smartly merging across page boundaries.

tdoggette• 17 years ago

I still don't buy things Sony makes after their contempt for customers was put on display with the rootkit business.

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

I would love a Sony with a 3G modem, a Kindle-like keyboard and a usable mouse. A big bonus if the Linux underneath the book-reader is usable.

I wonder what xterm would look like on e-paper...

zimbabwe• 17 years ago

The Kindle is absolutely worth buying. Just break the DRM on the books you get, take back-ups, and remember that The Pirate Bay is your friend when Amazon does something stupid.

(http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5003507/1984_-_George_Orwell, for people in a rebellious mood.)

eli• 17 years ago

No thanks. Setting aside the ethics of piracy, I'd rather not have to worry that Amazon is going to push out an update that I'll have to crack just to keep using the device I already bought.

I'd rather just live without it until something better and more open comes along. It's like deciding to use Linux instead of pirating Windows.

reduxredacted5• 17 years ago

Step 1 - Remove legitimately purchased e-books that the publisher "changed their mind on"

Step 2 - Remove books that cannot be identified as legitimately purchased.

The "whispernet" functionality is often talked about as this great feature of the Kindle. It's the single biggest reason that I won't buy one.

tjmc• 17 years ago

Why go to the Pirate Bay when you can download it for free from Australia?

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/

The copyright has expired here, in Canada and any number of other places. You poor Americans really got screwed by the Mouse.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go sell illegal copies of Fahrenheit 451 on Amazon...

noamsml• 17 years ago

I'm starting to think Randall Munroe was right about piracy: I'd rather be a criminal and know the media I have is under my control than stay legal and have someone reach out and quietly delete (or, in the future, modify) the data on my machine.

Also: I'd rather buy a physical book than either of those.

chaostheory• 17 years ago

what do people think of the foxit's ebook reader entry? http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ebook/

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

I like it a lot, especially with technical content (http://zacharypinter.com/2009/03/01/technical-content-on-the...). However, the SD card is a bit annoying.

I really wish somebody would make an ebook reader that's easily hackable, reasonably priced, good on battery life, and displays PDF's well. The eSlick gets 3/4.

My ideal device would be one that can read RSS feeds and sync with Dropbox over wifi. Maybe the easy-on-the-eyes netbook screens are the answer?

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

Curiously, the full text of the book is prominently posted online in multiple places, for example:

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/index.html

This could be because the copyright has expired almost everywhere.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

He wrote it in 1948, which is post Mickey so it is still under copyright.

Not that it matters, as you pointed out.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

It's still under copyright in the US and UK, but not in Canada, where the copyright was "only" the author's life plus 50 years.

http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/info.htm

Elessar• 17 years ago

I felt Amazon had gained respect when they released their MP3 store without DRM.

They have lost it today, utterly and likely irredeemably. There is no excuse for taking back what a customer has already purchased. None.

And that they did so without even asking the customer? It should be considered outright criminal.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

My guess is that it is actually illegal.

frossie2• 17 years ago

I don't know whether it is illegal. I am trying to figure out if this violates their TOS:

Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon"

Is that "or" a get-out clause? Because the first part seems to quite definitively rule out what they did.

blhack4• 17 years ago

It is most definitely not illegal.

When you "purchase a book" from the kindle store, all you are actually purchasing is a license to view the book that is bound by amazon's terms of use.

blhack4• 17 years ago

My guess is that they either play nice with the publishing companies, or not at all.

Believe me, amazon hates this as much as you do. They had to credit a bunch of people's accounts for the books. Amazon is a company. One that spends money. The publisher is not the ONLY person that is seeing a taste of the $9.99. They're out the money they had to give to sprint (is it sprint that provides the connectivity? somebody correct me if I'm wrong), and every other cost that was covered by the money you spent on the book.

This was a horrible horrible move for all parties involved.

anatoly6• 17 years ago

Sony is able to sell ebooks for its reader w/o being able to retroactively delete them. Why can't Amazon? I'm not sure they "hate it as much as I do". They may hate the fact that they're out of the refund money in this case, but love their ability to own the books on the customers' Kindles and be able to delete them at will.

darreld• 17 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I saw the refund email this morning but didn't put it together until I read about it on the web (it didn't mention deactivating the book). I checked my iPhone Kindle app and, sure enough, "1984" had been removed. I almost can't believe it. They reached into my device and turned off a book I bought from them.

I now know I'll never get a Kindle. Also I will not buy any more digital books from Amazon. It's a shame. I liked it.

rimantas• 17 years ago

DRM free Amazon music store was just a tool for the record industry to put pressure on Apple.

tjic• 17 years ago

I'm not usually one of the anti-DRM frothing at the mouth folks...

but this screams out EPIC FAIL.

wmblaettler• 17 years ago

It would have been even more ironic if the book had been Fahrenheit 451.

macmac• 17 years ago

Does anybody know what happened to the owner's annotations?

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

Yeah wouldn't those annotations be copyrighted by the owner, and hence Amazon seizing them would constitute basis for case of appropriating someone else's work.

Of course IANAL, I'm just speculating, and am 95% certain what I just said wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

sailormoon7• 17 years ago

How could a user prove their annotations ever even existed?

weaksauce2• 17 years ago

What I do not get is how amazon can be so right on the DRM issue with regards to digital music and be so backwards on the DRM of books.

blhack4• 17 years ago

It isn't amazon, it is the publishers.

Somebody commented on my blog about this the other day, and nailed it pretty well: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/comments/4043/

weaksauce2• 17 years ago

Great link! I am just surprised that amazon cannot explain this to the publishers. It would seem that they have a good deal of clout with the publishers being such an online presence. If they went the iPod route and once it gets on the device it is hard for the average person to get the data back off. That should satiate the publishers that they are not going to get easily ripped off. Of course the hackers here know to download a piece of software to transfer the songs off an iPod but 80%(not a real statistic) does not know how to do this.

andreyf14• 17 years ago

It's not the publishers, it's copyright law. Copyright law gives the publishers certain rights. Publishers are economic entities which maximize profits. Blaming publishers for exercising legal rights which maximize profit is like blaming rocks for falling on people.

blhack4• 17 years ago

Does anybody know if amazon actively checks the books put on your kindle via their email service? There are a number of books that I own in dead-tree format (some of them, multiple copies in dead-tree format) that they don't offer in the kindle store.

This sort of move really scares me; I have been contemplating moving some of them to the kindle (I have the books in .txt format).

timf• 17 years ago

"Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon."

From: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

The last 1.5 sentences seem to nullify the rest of the paragraph for all intents and purposes...

tolmasky• 17 years ago

Is that really how contracts work (honest question)? You can essentially put "just kidding" at the end of a contract and everything above it is nullified? If this is the case than those portions of the contract would seem to act solely for the purposes of deception.

lallysingh2• 17 years ago

Yup, just like the 'unless' keyword in Perl.

cschneid• 17 years ago

Sorta, not really. Contracts have a lot more leeway than they look like. If the judge thinks you're being abusive in the writing of a contract, they'll say "nope, sorry, you lose", or throw out that clause and keep going.

IANAL, etc.

svandoren• 17 years ago

The book is under copyright still in America. The Orwell estate is to be blamed for this, not Amazon, except they should be trashed for not vetting, properly, a book they thought was in the public domain.

keyist• 17 years ago

1984 the book only tells us about a bleak future. Amazon's Kindle policies show u that future. They're just following the maxim "Show, don't tell!"

Obligatory link to Stallman's Right to Read essay: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Deleting the books is actually one of the more benign things they can do. What is truly scary is them or others changing the content of books Ministry of Truth style, without us realizing it.

sailormoon7• 17 years ago

Your comment goes a little too far (this is not the full realisation of 1984, not yet anyway) but you do raise a good point. It introduces the first actual working memory hole; one of the key enablers of the 1984 regime.

Imagine some little guy writes a controversial tell-all book, it's published. People buy it on Kindle. The guy is sued by The Man, loses, and any unsold books are pulped - plus, now, any Kindle books are recalled, or possibly revised.

We have the technology ...

andreyf14• 17 years ago

And we have the legal basis, in some parts of the world (notably, China).

jknupp2• 17 years ago

I had this on my Kindle and didn't realize it had been deleted until I read the story here. The email from Amazon is in the "Your Amazon.com Order #XXX..." format familiar to anyone who buys kindle content regularly, so many will not even realize this was removed.

1984 is literally my favorite book. I was happy to have it on my Kindle, readily available at all times. You would think, then, that I would be outraged by this. To be honest, after I got over the initial creepy "they went into MY device and deleted something" feeling, my (positive) feelings about either Amazon and the Kindle itself were unchanged. It's still an amazingly useful device that I get a ton of mileage out of, and they made a dumb mistake that just happened to affect me. I've been fully reimbursed for the title (all $0.99 of it), so no harm done.

The concerns about Amazon randomly deleting content on your Kindle seem overblown. The ostensible purpose of the Kindle is to drive sales of Amazon's e-books. How would deleting customers' purchases on a frequent basis further that goal? I'm willing to write this off as a one-time occurrence, albeit an unfortunate and somewhat frustrating one.

breck• 17 years ago

Interesting comment.

I feel like too many people are speaking up on HN just to speak (I wonder if the demographic has changed lately). I like this comment because it adds some data, not just an opinion or crafted argument.

I come to HN to hear first hand accounts from people. jknupp's comment is a good example. Other great examples are when founders comment on articles about their companies, or programmers about their code, or authors about their articles. But above this comment, with 40+ upvotes, are a couple of comments where the commenter doesn't even own a kindle, nevermind having 1984. sigh.

sailormoon7• 17 years ago

Huh? Does owning a Kindle give you some special insight into the question of DRM, copyright, consumer rights, etc, inaccessible to others? How would owning a Kindle make you more qualified to comment on this development?

Maybe a lot of people didn't buy the Kindle because they have compelling, well-argued positions on why they don't accept the limitations imposed on you by the product's terms and conditions. If anything those people are probably more informed on the issue than someone who just bought the latest gadget.

Speaking up just to speak is a problem, yes. But if you're going to impose barriers to participation, let's have them be a little less arbitrary than "owns a Kindle".

andreyf14• 17 years ago

I, too, am disappointed that we have pages after pages of comments of knee-jerk reactions with without anyone bothering to take a moment and ask "why did they do this?".

anatoly6• 17 years ago

You're missing the point. It isn't Amazon that needs to want to delete your content, it's the publisher. Amazon enables the publisher to do it. In this case, Amazon didn't want to delete 1984 off your Kindle, the publisher did.

Say you bought a non-fiction book exposing some company's practices, or the Church of Scientology, or whoever, and they come after the publisher with defamation lawsuits. The publisher withdraws the book because it can't afford the legal battle, and Amazon deletes it off your Kindle. You don't get a say, Amazon doesn't get a say, Amazon's general desire to drive up its sales, which you base your optimisitic assessment on, plays no role whatsoever.

Or maybe it's not a defamation lawsuit, it's a copyright case over 10 lines of quotations in a novel you bought on your Kindle. And the publisher is just threatened with a suit, and decides to withdraw the book.

Or maybe you bought some memoirs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces), and later there's a scandal over how the author made it all up. To hush up the scandal, the publisher simply withdraws the book.

Etc. etc.

adharmad3• 17 years ago

Regardless, Amazon should have done their homework and ensured that it was OK with the publishers before actually selling the commodity.

Its too late after they have sold the commodity to go ahead and forcibly reverse the sale. And they have to take some flak associated with this whole issue.

I do not understand the comments which say that "Amazon is blameless and blame the publisher". Sure they are less to blame than the publisher for this whole mess, but they do have some responsibility. As a large corporation, they should have checked it out with the publisher BEFORE they sold the book.

Also, they could have told the publishers that "the book is sold and we cannot reverse the transaction". Why make the world aware of the fact that they control the kindle content to such a large extent? It is simply opening a door to the publishers, who can later on make such demands in other cases also.

jknupp2• 17 years ago

I didn't mean to imply that I thought Amazon capriciously decided to remove this themselves. I was merely saying, in all honesty, how often is a publisher going to withdraw all online copies of a book? It's in neither the publisher's nor Amazon's best interest to make this a frequent occurrence.

I understand what happened here, but I honestly don't see it happening too frequently.

maxniederhofer• 17 years ago

Just underlines the market opportunity for someone who is not beholden to publishers to launch an open ereader...

socratees• 17 years ago

That's shocking. esp. a book such as 1984. why would they do that? Did the customer service provide any specific reasons why the book was pulled out?

gojomo• 17 years ago

Next week, Amazon plans a special interactive commemorative edition of Fahrenheit 451 that will trigger a battery-overload, setting your Kindle on fire and destroying its entire contents.

veritgo• 17 years ago

Nowhere near the same level of disappointment, but it is kind of sad that an article from the NYTimes lacks any mention that they tried to contact Amazon for a comment. Even a simple 'Amazon was called but declined to comment' would have been appreciated.

sailormoon7• 17 years ago

What could Amazon possible say to defend their actions? The facts are plain to see. Personally I could do without their lame corporate spin, anyway.

edit: why the downvotes? It's a sincere comment! When Sony installed frickin' rootkits on people's computers, did anyone say "wait, wait, let's wait for their side of the story"? Of course not.

"Why" doesn't matter. What matters is that it can be done, that it has been done, and it might well be done again. Nothing Amazon says changes any of that. I stand by what I said.

andreyf14• 17 years ago

Um, Amazon could point out that the decision to withdraw the book was that of the publisher, and that they are legally bound to defend the rights publishers as defined under US law.

Think of it this way - there are a couple of parties here. Both Amazon and most publishers are public corporations. That means they have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. The law allows publishers certain rights, and, in order to follow the law (maximize shareholder value), they must take advantage of those rights.

Amazon, in turn, has a choice of forcing the publishers give up their rights under the law. Doing so would decrease the number of publishers that sell books. I imagine they did an economic analysis and figured that to maximize shareholder value, they must protect the publishers' legal right at the expense of common understanding of "readers' rights".

So, where exactly is the problem here? Is it in people following the laws?

I would say no: the problem is with the laws themselves. Which laws is an interesting question, one that is very much lacking discussion on this forum :(

jrockway2• 17 years ago

It was a blog hosted by the Times, not an article in the Times.

rcoder3• 17 years ago

From what I saw on the Kindle forums, the publisher of these editions (MobileReference) mostly offers $0.99 downloads of public-domain texts. There's a $10 version of 1984 still available for purchase from Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W

So, it looks to me like this was a case of a publisher illegally distributing a book to which they had no license. As an analogy, think of people who buy a bootleg DVD from a flea market while traveling overseas, only to discover it won't play in their region-locked DVD player at home. Yes, it sucks that DRM prevented them from using media they thought they had bought, but they also knew perfectly well that they were getting a deal that was just a little too good to be true.

easyfrag• 17 years ago

If this was indeed the case then the better solution would have been for Amazon to pay the royalties to the copyright holder on the previous sales and quietly remove the 99 cent version from the store. This is a public relations disaster for the Kindle.

I disagree with your argument that people should have known this was too good to be true. Orwell has been dead for almost 60 years, 1984 will be public domain soon enough.

grandalf5• 17 years ago

disaster? are you kidding? I'm a kindle user and I could care less about this news.

rcoder3• 17 years ago

That assumes that it was simply an issue of royalty payments. Publishing agreements can have many more restrictions (only authorized content, limits to which markets can be served, editorial veto, etc.) that aren't just about paying $0.20/unit.

Regardless of the feasibility, I wouldn't expect Amazon to have any interest in creating a precedent of them paying to cover up for the mistakes of publishers on the Kindle store. Unlike many people, I actually think that yanking unauthorized books after download is totally reasonable, provided Amazon offers a detailed explanation of the reason.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

This is a good thing. Nobody minds DRM when it doesn't bite them. When it starts fucking them over, they will start getting upset and stop buying intentionally crippled products. Then DRM will die. (Does DRM'd music even exist anymore?)

DannoHung• 17 years ago

One day, someone's gonna come out with a 8 1/2" x 11" eBook reader that doesn't look like it ran into the ugly tree at 80 mph that doesn't have any associated DRM and I am gonna buy the FUCK out of that thing.

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

Simple fact. If there is DRM of any kind, you do not own it. Period.

MaddHatta• 17 years ago

"Books simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the kindles, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word."

timwiseman• 17 years ago

Incidentally, arstechnica has a detailed write up at

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/amazon-sold-...

Amazon deletes purchased copies of 1984 from Kindle

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