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.

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 digital 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.

Apparently, until last week, Amazon claimed it wouldn't take back purchased books either: The New York Times' Brad Stone reports:

Amazon's published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a "permanent copy of the applicable digital content."

But this isn't the first time there has been a problem with secret deletings. Stone adds:

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.

Now that the public is up in arms over the Kindle deletions, Amazon is once again promising good behavior. 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.

That "in these circumstances" bit doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Sounds like books will be removed again under other (undefined) 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=2&


seems odd that only 1984 was removed....thats why it's better to just buy the books, they can't take those away..

Looks like stealing to me.

what do you want?
It is way too Prophetic!

Guess ATLAS SHRUGGED will be next,and any other dystopian Novel!

copyright law or not, seems a little fascist... smells to high hell of democrats being involved in some way...

Right thing to do would have been to charge Amazon for the Copyrights-Fee on the Books sold,and enjoin them not to sell any others!

yea, but then they wouldn't have the enjoyment of being fascist and telling people what they can or can't read... 1984 and animal farm is not on the liberal's approved reading list...

But it was one of theirs who wrote Novels!

Orwell was a Socialist until he died,but was extremely appalled by the way it was applied in the USSR!
Guess it never dawned on him that this was the only way to implement!

I suppose he never asked himself the question,"So if Socialism is so great...why does it have to be mandated and forced on people?"

They're deleting it from Kindle, yet you can still buy it on Kindle?

http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Farm-and-1984-ebook/dp/B003ZX868W/ref=sr_1_2_bnp_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1365614805&sr=1-2&keywords=1984

Maybe they settled that Copyright-Thingy!
The Owners would be stupid not to make Money with Royalties!

you can't buy the kindle version, the link to it is gone... the others you can buy, the books and audio, but not kindles...

The page I linked to IS the Kindle version.

ok, try to buy it... the link to the kindle is not there...nowhere to click to get the kindle version, just the books...

This is why I still like buying real books instead of virtual books. Also I hate using anything that someone from another place has more control over it then I do. One reason I have never been a fan of the I-phone. I do have a droid, but I don’t trust Google as well. But would not all those people who bought the book have to be refunded their money since Amazon deleted them?

There's nothing like the feel of turning pages in a book you own.

yea, the article says they did...

Copyright law sucks!...It used to be that an author's copyright expired 50 years after his death, but in the UK, they extended it to 70. This means that Orwell's (Blair's) stuff won't be in the public domain until 2020.

I wonder what little corporate bloodsuckers are profiting from his life's work until 2020?...I kinda doubt that his family is.

I heard a rumour that Greece was holding the copyright on Plato's Republic and using it (along with the Parthenon, Acropolis & the rest of Greece) as security against an IMF loan that they defaulted on.

Now that greece is belly up, I'm expecting to find some bargains on ebay. I can't afford the whole country of course, but I figure if nobody else is interested, I should be able to get Mt. Olympus for a song (the shipping costs are ridiculous though) to use as a conversational paperweight in the office. Failing that, I might try for the copyright on Plato's work...His "Republic" would make a great coffee table book...

To increase the value of it, I think I'll have Amazon destroy all the ebook versions.

Really? was it not the Bush junta that created the Orwellian state with the Patriot act? implemented a short time after 911?

You ain't seen nothing yet,Mister!
You have Big Brother aka Buzz Windrip sitting in the WH now!

Also, considering the voting habits of todays youth doesn't exactly reflect a sound understanding in the history of politics, I would prefer these books be available where they have the best chance of consumption. I hope they work it out and make it available on Kindle again.

I do use my Kindle more than pages these days, but it's nice to know Animal Farm, 1984 and Atlas Shrugged can't be removed from my shelves so easily...not yet anyway.

and definitely not from mine!