Amazon has pulled a true “Big Brother” by deleting Kindle versions of the George Orwell novels 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of users who had already paid for the books. Nice.
To be fair, we should point out that these were unauthorized versions of the books, contrary to what some other sources are reporting.
Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesperson, said in an e-mail that the books had been uploaded to the Kindle store by a company that didn’t have rights to the novels, using a “self-serve” 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.
While the reasoning for the decision was sound, many users are obviously upset and feel a bit violated that Amazon deleting things they had paid for from their Kindles.
Amazon has since acknowledged that this was a bad idea.
“We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Herdener added.
An authorized digital edition of “1984″ from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is still available in the Kindle store, but there is no other available version of “Animal Farm.”
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