Kindle's not a Book Shelf

When I bought my Kindle (I'm on my fourth one now), I loved the idea of being able to carry lots of books around with me and add more on the fly.  I'm a voracious reader and I was tired of carrying a dozen books on a long trip or running out of reading material (worse).

All our local book stores and Amazon can testify to my reading habits.  I didn't like everything about the Kindle -- no back light, the battery runs out (!), can't get every book I want, can't use it on a plane during take off and landing (I carry one paper back with me on every trip just for that purpose) -- to say nothing about how expensive and fragile it was.  But I loved it still.

Today I found out something I had been briefly shielded from by my eccentric habits vis a vis books. I don't buy cookbooks or science fiction books (or art books for that matter) for my Kindle, because I collect them.  So, of course, my copies of 1984 and Animal Farm exist on a physical book shelf among my 10,000 or so other books that I was hoping the Kindle would keep me from adding to.

But it turns out (read this blog from Pogue in the New York Times) and you'll discover that Amazon chose to remove these books from Kindles (and issue credits) rather than continue to argue with their publisher.  Now I'm feeling uneasy.  Very uneasy.  What if they did that to a mystery I had been reading for two days, just before I got to the denouement?  To a technology reference I was depending on for an article or speech I was writing?

I think Amazon owes all of us an explanation -- at least a better understanding of why this happened and under what circumstances it could happen again.

Comments

[Al]

Interesting post. My, my 10,000 books--you really are a voracious reader. Have a fun Friday and great weekend. Hopefully this glitch with Amazon will eventually work out in your favor.

[Steve]

I'm not sure why you're surprised at any of this.

It was something that was indirectly predicted long ago by none other than Richard Stallman, writing in the Association for Computing Machinery's "Communications of the ACM" back in 1997 (here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html).

That's why I buy only dead tree editions of books and only physical CDs on the rare occasions when I buy music -- I have physical possession and can do what I want with them.

Not so with digital editions, which can vanish in an instant at the whim of Amazon, Microsoft, or Apple (just to pick three of the larger players).

Lauren Weinstein said this was akin to Amazon breaking into your house, taking something, and leaving a check. I suggest this analogy is flawed, since the Kindle is not a house and not even a locked door. It's more like leaving your car parked on the street and the repossessor coming in the middle of the night to spirit it away. In fact, it's like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition.

In that event, you sort of get what you deserve.

[John Levine]

Subsequent reports said that Amazon learned that they were pirate editions, not authorized by Orwell's estate. Under those circumstances, none of their options were very attractive.

They do seem to have a legal Kindle edition of 1984, so I'm kind of surprised they didn't just replace the pirate one with the legal one.

[John A Arkansawyer]

Quite an analogy, Steve, and a splooch of moralism on top for the closer. Let's try a different one:

It's like handing the keys to your car to the attendant at the parking lot. You've entered into a transaction with the attendant's employer (with the attendant as the employer's agent). That employer promises to take reasonable care not to hand your trunk's contents over to thieves, not to take your car drag racing, and to give it back to you when you ask for it.

If that employer (or its agent) violates the agreement, you are getting what you don't deserve, and you have legal recourse.

There is where my analogy may break with reality: What recourse do you have with Amazon?