Amazon’s Removal of Orwell’s Books from Kindles
It's pretty big news today - Amazon received notice from the rights-holders of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm that forced them to remove the un-licensed copies from user's Kindle readers. I can certainly understand the folks saying that this is a serious blow to e-books: that they aren't the same as books... you can't sell them after you've read them, you can't donate them to a library, there are a lot of things you can't do. But they say now that you can't even really be sure that they ever really belong to you.
It's a fair critique. But Amazon's business is really the publishers and the customers. They are a middle-man. No way they could exist without both groups. Take one away and the other will leave. There's nothing they can do about it.
So they have to strike a compromise here. That compromise, it seems, is still developing, but it appears that the new compromise is going to be "if you have it, it's yours" - like the Apple AppStore. It's fair, but this also means you can't transfer it to another device - which can be a pain to many as devices fail and need to be replaced.
It's a tricky line to walk, and while I'm not interested in losing my books, I have to understand that when I buy them in this electronic state, where the laws have clearly not caught up to us, that I'm accepting a lot of the risk here. In 50 years the laws will have caught up and this will all be settled - one way or the other. Until then, it's a little bit of the buyer beware.
Sad, but true.