This comes from Pogue's Post, the New York Times technology blog by David Pogue:
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.
2 comments:
Wow! This is, indeed, chilling. I've thought about purchasing a Kindle only to experience first-hand what it's like to own & use one. But there is no way I'm buying books on an electronic reader as a substitute for buying the real thing. That it's Orwell in this case is deliciously ironic.The only need I could see for a Kindle is for someone who travels and needs access to multiple books, and this isn't me.
Yes, I think it's good for people who travel. Instead of carrying a handful of heavy books, the traveler can keep a few hundred on the Kindle.
I was reading an article in Wired yesterday in which several contemporary authors discussed writing and reading. One said that with e-books, people cannot come into our homes and see all the books we own, since they are electronic; that means we can no longer impress people with our intelligence by simply showing off our shelves filled with books.
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