Worthy heads up from David Pogue:
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
…
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
The situation seems not to be as dire as originally thought. The books deleted were never authorized for sale on the Kindle, and Amazon was trying to correct its mistake out of consideration for the publisher. All the same, Amazon has said that they will respond differently should a similar situation arise in future.
Issues like this seem unavoidable to me as long as DRM remains standard practice, and the risk that an outside force will exercise control over MY books has certainly depressed a few sales. The early days of any new medium will be rough.
Another way of dealing with this issue completely might be the possibility of subscription access to set libraries. Much along the model of Safari books. In that model, the concept of ownership is replaced with ‘access’ to volumes of helpful info. That access is sold in terms of scope or length of time.
HT to Brian Hollar @ Thinking on the Margin, who is also following the ebook trend.
