Thousands of people had their copies of George Orwell’s 1984 deleted from their Kindle book readers by Amazon, illegally, secretly, & without their consent.
If I recall correctly, my comments in a “Kindle” Thread included the concept that government or corporations could easily censor your library, without your consent, for ideological or other reasons.
Today it just happened.
Keep your paperbacks.
Wow, that’s very… uh… what’s the word… you know, where they use propaganda and deceit for political control… it’s named after a writer… Oh right, Machiavellian.
though i actually do own a kindle, i have not actually bought anything from amazon for it, I only buy open DRM files, and they are duplicated on my computer, my kindle and my cellphone, and stored burned on a dvd. Not possible to delete my files. They would have to redelete something every time I loaded it [IF i actually bothered turning on the wireless and actually going online with the thing.
It’s not censorship; it was an attempt to recall a ‘pirated’ work. The works (Animal Farm, too) were uploaded to Amazon’s catalog by a company that does not own the rights to them. When Amazon was made aware of the illegally reproduced works on their site, they deleted them. They also refunded people’s money, apologized, and said they won’t do that again. It’s not covered but I highly suspect that the Rand and Potter works were similarly ‘pirated’ offerings. This means that Amazon is going to have to take a lot longer to approve uploads by booksellers due to the need to confirm copyright/reproduction status, and I suspect that older works and smaller booksellers will be hit harder than ones where the publication status is more clearcut.
Sucky.
As a matter of interest, in the Kindle library TOS, (I assume that Amazon has one,) do they put in the usual corporate CYA language about how you’re not really buying the book file free and clear, but a licence to use it according to certain terms?
According to the New York Times
1984 does not exist. 1984 has never existed.
Shit. That means I never graduated from High School. 
In case anyone is still freaking out, this is not a censorship issue, this is an army of lawyers gone wild issue, so relax, nothing bad could possibly come out of this.
Minor clarification:
Amazon did not delete the book from everybody’s Kindles. They deleted the book from the cloud (that mythical semi-real place where your ebooks “live” on the internet). Then when the Kindle next called the mothership (to update subscriptions, get new books, see what was going on), the local copy was deleted because it was gone from your library.
Still dumbass, but not quite as “boogah-boogah” scary as Jeff Bezos reaching out from his secret headquarters to pervert every Kindle in America.
Don’t know if you can turn off the synchronization (possibly just turning off the wireless access might do it)?
I understand why they did it. Recalling a pirated work is OK by me.
The fact the CAN do it creeps me out.
At least they didn’t delete 1985. I love that song. :eek:
The ability to change what already happened by simply changing all records of it.
If I had some talent I would a write a book around that idea. Sadly, all I got so far is the title “The last man in Europe”.
There was an episode of Babylon 5 (the Season 4 finale: The Deconstruction of Falling Stars) which showed people in the distant future doing this very thing back and forth with the historical records concerning Babylon 5. So maybe we could describe it as Straczynskian?
Nahh, too hard to spell. 
I am sure this episode will be studied as an iconic PR fiasco for decades to come. I wonder if the person who made the decision has ever read 1984.
I think you mean Orwellian, but it rhymes.
And you can get 1984 for the Kindle in a legitimate edition.
And instead of deleting your copy of it, they should replace it with the correct one, as you ALREADY bought and PAID for it, or did they refund everybody…:dubious:
Sorry, if you bought it in good faith, it is not your problem they screwed up on making sure they could legitemately sell it … so they are penalizing the purchaser for believing that amazon could sell them the work. Now the people that paid full nick for the ebook are fucked out of their money and book.
See? That is exactly why I refuse to go with DRM enabled ebooks, and I refuse to let my kindle call home to Big Brother.
Unless they decide to delete it again.