So much discussion and kerfuffle over Amazon deleting from Kindle accounts (with refund) some books which they’d sold to people (copies of 1984 and Animal Farm). People were rightly upset to discover that Amazon could just take away books that they “owned.”
Amazon’s explained itself a slight bit further, and is also changing how it handles such matters:
An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
This doesn’t look to be the first case this has happened. Harry Potter and Ayn Rand books have been similarly disappeared.
Interestingly, it’s not clear that Amazon was even allowed to do this, based on its own rules.
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.”
And for those who take advantage of all those cool features the Kindle gives you?
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.
Yeah, still an issue.