I never did trust that fucking Kindle. Now Matt on Facebook supplies us with good reason to view it askance. (Very askance.)
“NEW YORK – A pirated e-book of 1984 led to an Orwellian moment for Kindle customers. Users of Amazon.com’s e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including 1984" and "Animal Farm," had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded.
It was conspiracy time on the Internet. Big Brother? Pressure from the publisher? No, says an Amazon spokesman — the deletion of pirated copies that had been posted to the Kindle store.
"These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third party who did not have the rights to the books," spokesman Drew Herdener said Friday.
"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. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."
Herdener's explanation differed from what Kindle users were told by Amazon's customer service, which made no reference to piracy, but implied that the removal was the publisher's choice. "Published by MobileReference ... (the books) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase," according to an e-mail sent to customers. "When this occurred, 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."
Herdener said the customer service statement was incorrect, and reiterated that the works were pulled because of legal issues. MobileReference is a digital publisher that offers a wide range of literary titles, although Orwell's books were not mentioned on the company's Web site as of Friday night. An e-mail message sent to the publisher's owner, SoundTells, was not immediately returned.
The Orwell ordeal highlighted two concerns in the virtual world — that a book already paid for and acquired can be revoked by the long arm of an e-tailer (the Kindle operates on a wireless connection that Amazon ultimately controls); and the difficulty of stopping bootlegged texts.
The digital library is rapidly growing, but numerous classic works, from "Catch-22" to "Lolita," remain unavailable as e-books. Piracy has been one concern for rights holders, although illegal works have yet to have a measurable impact on sales.”
The secret word is Minitrue.
“NEW YORK – A pirated e-book of 1984 led to an Orwellian moment for Kindle customers. Users of Amazon.com’s e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including 1984" and "Animal Farm," had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded.
It was conspiracy time on the Internet. Big Brother? Pressure from the publisher? No, says an Amazon spokesman — the deletion of pirated copies that had been posted to the Kindle store.
"These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third party who did not have the rights to the books," spokesman Drew Herdener said Friday.
"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. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."
Herdener's explanation differed from what Kindle users were told by Amazon's customer service, which made no reference to piracy, but implied that the removal was the publisher's choice. "Published by MobileReference ... (the books) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase," according to an e-mail sent to customers. "When this occurred, 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."
Herdener said the customer service statement was incorrect, and reiterated that the works were pulled because of legal issues. MobileReference is a digital publisher that offers a wide range of literary titles, although Orwell's books were not mentioned on the company's Web site as of Friday night. An e-mail message sent to the publisher's owner, SoundTells, was not immediately returned.
The Orwell ordeal highlighted two concerns in the virtual world — that a book already paid for and acquired can be revoked by the long arm of an e-tailer (the Kindle operates on a wireless connection that Amazon ultimately controls); and the difficulty of stopping bootlegged texts.
The digital library is rapidly growing, but numerous classic works, from "Catch-22" to "Lolita," remain unavailable as e-books. Piracy has been one concern for rights holders, although illegal works have yet to have a measurable impact on sales.”
The secret word is Minitrue.
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7 comments:
This sort of incident is simply bound to happen with any media, most especially anything digital. You surely have CDs that were pirated that look just like the real thing, and it used to happen with vinyl too. Watches, clothing, orgasms...everything gets faked.
Amazon did what they had to do, regretably miscommunicated in the chaos of a first time occurance, and have learned from the experience. Be quite surprised if you see a repeat incident any time soon.
Kindle, while not my method of choice at home, is a most handy device for saving money, time and natural resources. I've heard nothing but high praise from a most wide range of people who use it. That Amazon got scammed by a unscrupulous 3rd party has virtually no bearing at all on the trustworthiness of electronic books, Kindle or Amazon itself. You'll need much more than a single incident of outside vendor malfeasance and minor customer service snafu for that.
Lets be real, it's much ado about nothing. And I hope your associates don't view you "askance" any time you drop a ball in the context of cutting edge innovation
Too often we overreact to the smaller, easier stories that the media serves us. This story involved a famous company and a famous book and was of course broadcast far and wide and so of course everyone chimed in on it. But "Big Brother infiltrating the net" is not in evidence in this example. That's just a cute convenience seeing as Mr. Orwell's works were involved. In fact, it's so tailor made for the bloggermouths that it might even be a nice piece of corporate espionage by those blatantly jealous clones at Sony.
For big brother and the Internet, you could take a real close look at the search engines and telecom providers. Then there's the bots and malware that harvest everything you do and transmit it elsewhere. Bit of a bigger worry than preserving a pirated Animal Farm on your Kindle.
This story, which broke weeks ago, has digested down to nothing because there was no real meat to it. Now if only the mastadons in the room could get a fraction of the attention!
Hey, anon, are you an Amazon respond-o-bot?
I certainly don't want to shell out close to four hundred bucks for a piece of hardwear over which the manufacturer/vendor retains control and can arbitrarily strip out data that I've downloaded. Fuck that shit. That's Big Brother as far as I'm concerned.
Right!
Diamond Jim - I do like the term 'respond-o-bot'
That first Anon post is the most hilariously obvious Amazon "talking points" regurgitation I've ever seen. Nice try, chumps.
I'll stay with books I can own (with actual resale value instead of just being 0s and 1s owned by Amazon syphoning ducats out of my local economy)
If so Matt, I give them credit for hiring a fine rhetoretician with good critical thinking skills regarding conspiracy to personally respond to popular blogs. A robot can't read that it masters have been "viewed askance" and then formulate a clever response(...lets all hope...) Plus, I'm pretty sure it said "Antoine."
NONETHELESS, y'all can have my paperbacks when you pry 'em (PRY EM DAMMIT!) from my cold dead hands! So I guess I'm with you in principal...
[I'm considering being buried with The Last Stand of The DNA Cowboys...]
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