Unless there is a reckoning here, this sets a truly frightening precedent for the cloud-based, streaming media world we are entering. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Publishing rights are certainly complicated, but they put their head into that lion’s mouth and they’re going to have to make it right for their customers. Maybe they could say “There was a mistake, please send it back and we’ll give you credit, or a replacement book” - and they could have said that this time.Ĭlearly Amazon was in a tight spot or they wouldn’t do this, but they could have at least kind of done the right thing. If, in a physical book, there was to be a typographical mistake on page 45, or royalty issues preventing further printings, I would not allow the publisher to enter my house and take that book without my consent. It’s certainly the publisher’s right to say “Actually… we’re going to stay out of the e-book business for now.” Fine by me, so am I! But they don’t get to come to my device and take my data that I paid for. I never wanted an iPhone because I didn’t want to have any devices under the control of anyone but myself - and now I’m never going to buy a Kindle. While Apple already holds sovereignty over the App Store’s contents, they also reserve the right to deactivate programs (or, one may extrapolate, activate programs) on any or all phones if they feel it’s necessary (or expedient). The “kill switch” has been brought up in other circumstances - most prominently with the iPhone. Scary, isn’t it? Positively Orwellian, in fact. The books were sucked out of the devices and customers were credited the ten bucks or whatever they paid - like it never happened. Today, Kindle users found themselves a few books short Amazon had, with no warning, pulled a kill switch on a set of books which a publisher wanted to no longer offer. I was hoping this wouldn’t happen, but I knew it would - it’s the danger of an always-on, always-connected society.
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