Causing outcry among customers

Jul 18, 2009 08:07 GMT  ·  By

In what is turning out to be a very bad move by Amazon, the book seller informed some of its customers on Thursday that some e-books they bought and thought they owned had been deleted from their Kindle reader and they'd be getting a refund instead. Not surprisingly, they weren't happy and turned very vocal about it. Having a company remotely remove an item you have purchased is enough to make you begin to believe in Big Brother conspiracy theories. Oh, and the best part, the e-books in question are George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), the classic dystopian novel about a totalitarian regime, and Animal Farm.

“The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured [sic.], your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store,” Amazon representatives said, cited in their forums.

While the explanation itself makes sense, the thought of a company having complete control over your content has been a wake up call for many starting to realize the big difference between a paper book you actually own and digital information stored on a device that can be accessed by the company that made it. It also raises a lot of questions about just how much a company should be allowed to control something you purchased and about the legality of the whole thing. In fact, it seems that Kindle's own TOS doesn't allow Amazon to remove an e-book after it’s been bought.

Amazon has, since, said it will not remove any more e-books after they are purchased and that it is looking into ways to prevent this type of situations from happening again, but, most likely, the issue is far from over.