Remember the whole hulaballoo about three weeks back, when Amazon.com remotely deleted editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from the Kindle devices of customer who had already purchased them? When Amazon discovered that the books had been added to the Kindle store by a company that didn’t actually own the rights to those books, it deleted those editions and automatically refunded the customers.
Ok… that’s understandable. But they deleted the books after readers had already purchased them. And without so much as a “heads up” or “please”: readers simply woke up one morning to find the books missing from their Kindles. And readers didn’t just simply lose their spot on the page. The New York Times relates:
Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.
Amazon has since apologized for the gaffe, and is looking into revising its systems to avoid a repeat. Nevertheless, the mini-scandal has raised some 
fascinating discussions about the ramifications of reading in the digital age. Brad Stone at the New York Times points out that:
Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.
(Unfortunately, some of these problems aren’t unique to books. Digital products aren’t your everyday products. When you make certain digital purchases, they belong to you… sort of. Ever heard of DRM?)
David Ulin at the Baltimore Sun sees Amazon.com as a sort of Big Brother figure that has tossed these books down the memory hole. (Talk about irony. As Jessika on Middle Raged Punk says, “Poor Orwell. It’s a good thing he’s not alive to see this.”) Ulin also sees books as a “collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than commerce that shouldn’t be merely bought and sold.” But Amazon.com is the behemoth of the book market, and has an almost complete strangehold on the eBook market. Does this grant the company, then, the power to alter collective memory at will? Ulin thinks it does.
However, over at NPR, Linda Wertheimer hosts a discussion with a few “eBook converts.” Despite the potential hiccups that come along with purchasing digital media, they beleive that overall, eBook technology is still a step in the right direction. Jonathan Gootenberg, a media and technology consultant, explains that
what makes up a book depends upon the content matter, it depends upon the use, and depends upon the individual and how they perceive it… It’s the ability to access the content, the ability to read it wherever I want and the ability to search it. I mean I there’s huge value in being able to find things within books in a much easier fashion than you can in a printed book.
Even Wertheimer is a fan:
Every once in a while I find myself brushing the top right hand corner with my hand like I’m going to turn the page. I’m so into it that it just doesn’t register as different from a book.
What do you think? Was this a hiccup in an otherwise exciting and promising industry, or a doubleplusungood sign of things to come?
-Naomi
#1 by Sam on August 10, 2009 - 5:59 pm
I think this is completely unacceptable of Amazon, but they do promise not to do it again, publishing an apology on the Kindle blog.
” Initial post: Jul 23, 2009 12:16 PM PDT
Jeffrey P. Bezos says:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com ”
http://kindleworld.blogspot.com/2009/07/jeff-bezos-apology-from-amazon.html
While the promise not to do it again is not in this apology, it is in other sources.
#2 by Naomi on August 11, 2009 - 10:21 am
Hi Sam,
Thanks for sharing that. I’m definitely glad that Amazon has recognized the foolishness of its actions, and that it’s working to avoid this sort of mistake in the future. But that’s not what worries me so much – what worries me is that this sort of incident points to the possibility of further abuses of the technology in the future. Not necessarily by Amazon. It’s just that the possibility exists.
Still, at the same time, we shouldn’t be paralyzed by fear about the possible repercussions of technological advancements.
This is a pretty sticky issue, right?
#3 by Cooper on September 6, 2009 - 12:40 am
I came upon your post, because I myself was investigating the question of whether or not this was a good investment for Amazon, or any company offering an ebook reader. I began to wonder if printed books would be no longer!
I happen to enjoy physical copies of books so much more than reading something on a screen, it is a palpable experience. Opening the cover, turning through the pages, closing the book, and sliding it into a bookshelf.
While I myself don’t have a kindle, I do have an iPod, and if reading the text on my iPod is in anyway similar to reading an ebook on a screen (however large) I don’t find it just as good. It’s like staring over a sim’s shoulder and reading what their reading in some game.
A book is a book in itself. It is nothing else. Books remain readable after a little rain, and even if you drop them. Books have been around for hundreds of years, since Gutenberg! They are perfect in their purpose, and I think that’s why they’ve stuck out all our technological advances. They don’t need batteries, and you can already read them in the sun.
The best thing about a printed book is that the publisher cannot take it away, for any reason. Furthermore, consider the malleability of the digital format. A books words could be changed on the author as people share their favorite titles with one another, whereas the printed word is immutably fixed–or rather, if it is altered against the author’s will the author has a publishing company to point to instead of some anonymous individual. That is to say, ebooks could, in this way, be hijacked.
It could be that one of the phenomena which made the iPods and other mp3 players so popular was the availability of pirated material! People just needed to buy an iPod for a potentially unlimited supply of songs, which leveled with the initial cost. I do not know if there is an underground online book club that can meet the same demands. In fact it seems that the publishers of ebooks have quite the hold on them, possibly with mp3 privacy in mind.
I suppose the good news is, if these kindles and ebooks do well, that means that people are reading, and that writers can still make a living. Ebooks also have the potential to improve the circulation of written works, and this could bolster readership. Ebooks also grant new writers different publishing opportunities.
But personally I’ll just paperback.
#4 by Michael Makovi on October 23, 2009 - 4:24 am
The whole Dignity of Difference affair, combined with this Nineteen-Eighty-Four affair, together worry me. Whereas the original first edition of Dignity of Difference is still available alongside the censored second edition, imagine this: Rabbi Sacks writes another book, but this time, the original first edition is entirely replaced by the new censored second edition. So Amazon deletes the old version and replaces it with the new one; period. The printing press nigh eradicated censorship (too many copies to track down and burn), but the Kindle resurrects it.
On the other hand, I see a tremendous advantage to the Kindle: out-of-print books could be available easily and cheaply. It took me some real work to get a hold of my beloved and cherished 1927 edition of Rabbi Dr. J. H. Hertz’s Affirmations of Judaism (truly, a beautiful work; it could still serve admirably as an introduction to Judaism, along with Rabbi Dr. Isidore Epstein’s Judaism and Rav Hirsch’s Nineteen Letters), and I haven’t been able to find any affordable copies of Hermann Schwab’s history of German Neo-Orthodoxy or Dayan Grunfeld’s Three Generations. (If you haven’t caught on, I LOVE the German Neo-Orthodox and the British Neo-Orthodox/Positive-Historical authorities. I also am enamoured with Turkish/Balkan Judeo-Spanish Sephardism.) The Kindle would allow out-of-print books to be cheaply available, because it costs nothing to upload one more electronic copy to one more customer; no longer do there have to be enough customers to justify a print run. Finally, I could buy the Breuer commentaries on Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah, which Feldheim had translated by Gertrude Hirschler, but which have long gone out of print!
And this would solve the crisis of its being prohibitively expensive for an aspiring graduate student to publish his scholarly work in satisfaction of his degree requirements. And it would help us laymen buy these exhorbitantly academic works; I’m just a yeshiva student, and I cannot afford the $70 for a copy of Avigdor Levy’s The Jews of the Ottoman Empire !
Plus, you can do text searches! No more laborously searching for passages!
But with a physical book, you can hold it in your hands, smell the glue and paper, and read it on Shabbat when melakhah is assur. I always used to hold that one could evaluate a book by its smell, and then I discovered my mommy holds the same. But what will happen to this minhag if the printed book goes the way of the dodo?
What say y’all to this?: how about combo deals in which you get both the physical book and the Kindle version bundled together, for an additional cost that is still less than the cost of a whole separate copy? That way, for a small additional cost less than 100% of the cost of the primary copy, you get the best of all worlds. And if it’s the old out-of-print book, and a physical copy is unavailable, well, a Kindle version alone, no matter how undesirable compared to the superior physical version, is better than nothing.
As an aside: I much admire and appreciate that which Littman Library does: any of their out-of-print books, they’ll specially print one or a few copies for individual customers. While this makes the book more expensive than buying it from an ordinary print run, at least it means one doesn’t have to laborously hunt down an expensive used copy. I’d rather buy a new specially-printed-on-demand copy at one-and-a-half or double price, than not be able to buy it at all.