what Amazon.com did presagesbok burning.

[link to www.slate.com]

Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four
How Amazon's remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning's digital future.

More here on this htread:

Amazon to World: We are Not Evil Totalitarians
[link to business.theatlantic.com]

A mini-scandal broke last week when it was reported that Amazon deleted copies of certain novels from its e-reader, the Kindle, including George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, the dystopian tome where "Big Brother" controls information flow. Creepy! Information-controlling companies want to avoid the label Orwellian, but it certainly doesn't help when the thing you're being Orwellian about is the work of George Orwell. Amazon explained the weird move this way:

"These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. 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. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."

Peter Kafka parses this lawyerspeak and winces, saying it doesn't seem to match Amazon's license terms, which seem to offer permanent access to the files you download onto your Kindle.