Amazon banning e-books

[jayducharme]

I just saw this somewhat scary report from David Pogue:

Pogue's Posts - The Latest in Technology From David Pogue
July 17, 2009, 12:57 pm
Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover
that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared
from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and
paid for-thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an
electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and
dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all
books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their
accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of
thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've
been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books,
only better. Already, we've learned that they're not really like
books, in that once we're finished reading them, we can't resell or
even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be
final.

As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into
our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've
been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the
coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none
other than George Orwell. And the books were "1984" and "Animal
Farm."

Scary.

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[.Andy]

There's already a thread about this. Amazon isn't "banning" ebooks. In this case it turned out that the "publisher" of the Orwell Books actually didn't have the copyright to be selling them. It was a stuff up on the publisher's behalf. Although it's still a pretty horrible precedent and poor PR for amazon.

Ars Technica has a better article.

 

[r.j.s]

Thread already: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/748300/

And don't use such a misleading title.