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Amazon Secretly Deletes 1984 from Kindle

 

By: David Deschesne

Fort Fairfield Journal, April 17, 2013

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.

Around 50 years ago, Eric Blair, pen name: George Orwell, authored a book entitled 1984 that described an authoritarian police state government that controlled the flow of information and dissemination of lies by collecting up and burning newspapers, magazines and books in what he called the “memory hole” - a large furnace deep in the basement of the “Ministry of Truth” -and replacing them with the new lies. Today, we don’t need a furnace or even fire when a few keystrokes on a computer can do the exact same thing. This is what book selling giant, Amazon has done with their electronic book reading format called, “Kindle.” Ironically, the book they digitally “burned” was Orwell’s 1984.

Kindle, another word for “fire,” or “to burn,” is also an ironic name for a book reading device that can be designed to electronically burn or remove books from existence—even after customers have paid for them.

www.beforeitsnews.com reports, “In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they’d been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people’s devices and refund them the money they’d paid.”

“An uproar followed, with outraged customers pointing out the irony that Amazon was deleting copies of a novel about a fascist media state that constantly alters history by changing records of what has happened. Amazon’s action flies in the face of what people expect when they purchase a book. Under the ‘right of first sale’ in the U.S., people can do whatever they like with a book after purchasing it, including giving it to a friend or reselling it. There is no option for a bookseller to take that book back once it’s sold.”

This isn’t the first time there has been a problem with secret deletings. According to Brad Stone from the New York Times, “Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.”

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener told reporters, “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

Regardless of whether you believe Amazon’s promise to leave your Kindle alone, the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you’re reading and when – and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a book file with a different file whose content is changed?

Perhaps more than anything else, this mass deletion of 1984 has made it clear that collecting e-books is going to require some technical know-how. No e-book is truly yours unless you can get it off your Kindle and onto your computer – hopefully a computer that isn’t connected to the internet.

 

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