Sunday, 19. July 2009
Why I'm not going to buy a Kindle07:43:32 PM
I'm very interested in electronic book
readers, but there have been a couple of reasons why I haven't looked seriously
into picking one up. Generally my objection has been that they aren't
ready due to connectivity, battery life, readability, cost and access to
media. Today Amazon gave us another reason not to - your books may
get deleted.
This may not directly be Amazon's fault,
but I'm guessing few Kindle owners knew that the books they purchased for
their Kindle might just get deleted one day. It's one thing for Amazon
to use a remote deletion function to remove something which they figured
out you somehow got access to illegally, but if you legally purchased a
book through Amazon, you're certainly entitled to think that you should
have that book stay on your device.
As this story mentions, it's incredibly ironic that one of the books deleted from user's Kindles was 1984. And as this piece in the NY Times notes, the copies of 1984 revoked were not legal for Amazon to sell in the US, so they were avoiding a legal fight with the publisher by pulling it. But that reveals what is really wrong with the situation, which is Amazon selling content in the US they couldn't legally sell and then wiping it out without informing users to correct their mistake. Amazon should have vetted the content better before selling it, and when they were called out by the published they should have contacted the impacted Kindle users before deleting the content.
So for now, still no e-book reader for me.
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Comments :
1. Pauline07/20/2009 09:53:13 AM
That's so lame of them!
