September 2009
In
a case of life imitating art, Amazon has angered some customers of its Kindle
electronic book service by remotely deleting two George Orwell books, Animal
Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Copies of the novels, which feature dystopian worlds, were wiped from the book
readers this week.
Many have compared the move to the workings of the totalitarian government in
Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which documents deemed inappropriate are dropped
into a “memory hole” and erased forever.
Amazon said the books were uploaded by a publisher who didn’t have the rights to
reproduce copies of them.
“When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal
copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,”
Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told the New York Times.
An
authorized digital edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four was made available for
Kindle users, but no versions of Animal Farm are being offered yet.
Some customers said they were upset after discovering that Amazon could erase
books that were already in a Kindle owner’s possession.
“I
never imagined that Amazon actually had the right,the
authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased,”
said Charles Slater, who bought Nineteen Eighty-Four for 99 cents US last
month.
“We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from
customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Herdener told the Times.
CBC News, July 19, 2009.
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