Re:Amazon vanishes 1984 from Kindles (2009)
by vertis on Wednesday July 14, 2021 @07:07AM
(#27831762)
There are many things to criticize Amazon about, but I feel like removing a e-book that is being fraudulently sold is a stretch. They have to operate with the legal environment.
In this regard we're not close to 1984. It's not every copy of the old book. The users are free to use their refund to re-purchase the book from the copyright holder. Assuming a 1-to-1 price, it would have been smarter to replace the copy (though this has some other interesting ethical problems).
I'm with you in general though. A while back I stopped using Amazon and kindle for a lot of my reading, preferring Calibre/koreader and sourcing from others where possible. Where there is no alternative to Amazon, I quickly export it to Calibre.
I think cloud companies scanning for unlicensed copies is a much better example. It's only a matter of time until someone scans a book manually, and then X cloud company decides it's "unlicensed". Partly solved by client side encryption and/or owncloud, but still.
In this regard we're not close to 1984. It's not every copy of the old book. The users are free to use their refund to re-purchase the book from the copyright holder. Assuming a 1-to-1 price, it would have been smarter to replace the copy (though this has some other interesting ethical problems).
I'm with you in general though. A while back I stopped using Amazon and kindle for a lot of my reading, preferring Calibre/koreader and sourcing from others where possible. Where there is no alternative to Amazon, I quickly export it to Calibre.
I think cloud companies scanning for unlicensed copies is a much better example. It's only a matter of time until someone scans a book manually, and then X cloud company decides it's "unlicensed". Partly solved by client side encryption and/or owncloud, but still.