Fuck you, Amazon

[solarbird]

This should not be legal, because this here is bullshit:

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.

NO.

Comments

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

Spamazon is famous for making poor customer service decisions.

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

I am so glad I didn't succumb to the Kindle. I've got a load of ebooks on my palm pilot and they seem to be pretty stable.

[pentane.livejournal.com]

I feel much better about my decision not to give up my paper every time I read something like this. Thanks.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

And this is why I'm not buying a Kindle until / unless the price drops below a hundred bucks. Maybe below seventy-five. If it's a fun toy, that's fine, but I buy mostly MMPBs, used, for an average price of four to six bucks. That's a lotta paper books for the price of a Kindle right now.

[meesto.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to be using paper books too. What a horror story!

[clemtaur.livejournal.com]

I had a comment about the 'Memory Holes' in George Orwell's book '1984'

That was before I followed the link..

..Now I'm just Gobsmacked.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

The publisher didn't change their minds. The "publisher" didn't have the rights in the first place. They mistakenly believed that the books in question were in the public domain, so they copied them to Amazon format and sold them without any royalties to the Orwell estate. Unsurprisingly, this is a violation of Amazon's terms of use. Yeah, Amazon's contract with the publishing houses says that if Amazon finds infringing copies, they delete them.

For giving up my "right" to keep illegally copied books, I'm being reimbursed about 1/3rd of list price for each book, and being given free 3G cellular modem access to most of the Internet from almost anywhere in the continental US. For books I'm willing to lose and that I don't expect to want to lend, which are all I ever buy for my Kindle, I consider that adequate compensation.

[harmfulguy.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Why is it that auditions for the Internet Olympics Conclusion Leap Team always happen on Friday afternoons?

[avram]

For giving up my "right" to keep illegally copied books

Why the scare-quotes? Are you claiming that someone who buys an illegally-published copy of a book doesn't have the right to keep it?

Let's take a non-electronic example from real publishing history: The Ace paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, published in the 1960s without any royalties paid to Tolkien, after Donald Wollheim convinced his company that the books weren't protected by US copyright law. Ace eventually changed its mind about this, and withdrew the books from publication and paid Tolkien a small royalty. But the people who'd bought those paperbacks still owned them. The books didn't magically disappear from their shelves. Ace didn't demand that the bookstores break into people homes and take the books back.

That's because those books were bought and owned. The Kindle encourages a new relationship with your books. Amazon uses the same old language to refer to the process by which you acquire your books -- you "buy" the books that they "sell", and you have them backed up on a "bookshelf". But it's not an ownership relationship; it's more like leasing.

If Amazon truthfully described this relationship, there'd be less of a moral issue. But then, customers might find a truthful description of the relationship less appealing, so Amazon might wind up selling fewer Kindles if they were honest.

[solarbird]

C.f. what agrumer said. The proper response for the estate is to sue the illicit publisher for owed violation - not to go grabbing books out of peoples individual libraries.

My "NO" comment stands.

[kmarier.livejournal.com]

In a word: DISGUSTING.

[emmacrew.livejournal.com]

The question becomes: Is Orwell spinning in his grave?

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

He has been for years, they've hooked up a generator and are powering most of Oxfordshire off him.

[zeightyfiv.livejournal.com]

As with the audio format licensing debacle earlier (can you say, "fair use"?), Amazon shows it doesn't have the balls to be a true innovator. Maybe someone else will seize the opportunity and displace them from the market edge.

[gazerwolf.livejournal.com]

Apparently it was a rights issue and Amazon has already figured out that it was a BAD idea to pull the books.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1&src=twt&twt=nytimesbusiness

(Still doesn't address the issue that Amazon has the ability to delete anything they want off of your Kindle though.)

[kairee.livejournal.com]

And i've actually been looking into kindles, too. Not anymore. I don't like the thought of remote self-destruct buttons. Refund or not, they should not have that control over something I buy and own.

If ever there was a good fuel for the fire against DRM though... perhaps there will be good work coming out of this yet.

[partywhipple.livejournal.com]

That sounds alot like THEFT

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

All hail fail the EULA.