A few days ago, the New York Times blogged about Amazon’s removal of “unauthorized” editions of “1984″ and “Animal Farm,” two classics by George Orwell (oh, the irony). As a side note, I happen to really love ”Animal Farm.” Yes, I was that geeky kid in school who got extra geeked up over reading this book.
In a nutshell:
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for – thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
Roy Tennant over at LibraryJournal.com posted concerns about this “rare” event (Amazon’s words):
The Kindle ability that many people like and enjoy — the ability to easily download new content just about anywhere and anytime — is also the very mechanism that can be used to censor what they read. Yes, I realize that this is an issue regarding publication rights, but it doesn’t take an imagination of Orwellian proportions to do the math. What would stop Amazon, or any entity with enough sway over Amazon (and here the list is longer than you may think) from censoring what you’re reading? At this point, nothing. Welcome to 1984 — only 25 years later than predicted.
Filed under: Books | Tagged: 1984, Amazon, Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, Animal Farm, George Orwell, George Orwell 1984, George Orwell Animal Farm, Kindle
