George Orwell

Amazon: We Won’t Delete Your Kindle Books Unless We Need to Delete Your Books

Peter Kafka in Media on October 1, 2009 at 8:10 am PT

It took several months–and a lawsuit–but Jeff Bezos and company are finally explaining when, and why, they’ll take away books you bought for your Kindle. Pretty reasonable, really.

Voices

Amazon Offers Redelivery or $30 to People Who Lost 1984

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on September 4, 2009 at 7:09 am PT

Amazon took a lot of heat in July when it wirelessly deleted copies of two George Orwell titles from the Kindle e-readers of some customers. CEO Jeff Bezos eventually apologized for the incident, calling it “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

Kindle Ate My Homework

John Paczkowski in News on July 30, 2009 at 4:17 pm PT

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s hair-shirt apology for Kindlegate was a nice gesture, but it didn’t go over particularly well with Justin Gawronski, a Michigan high school senior who lost his homework when the retailer remotely deleted a copy of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from his Kindle earlier this month. He’s filed a class action suit against Amazon seeking to prevent it from deleting books from Kindles in the future.

Jeff Bezos Apologizes for Kindlegate, but Can’t Promise It Won’t Happen Again

Peter Kafka in Media on July 23, 2009 at 8:01 pm PT

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t make it to his company’s earnings call today, but he did find time to apologize for Kindlegate–Amazon’s ham-fisted removal of George Orwell novels from his customers’ e-book readers. Great, right? Almost.

What Book Will Amazon Delete Next?

Peter Kafka in Media on July 21, 2009 at 5:11 am PT

Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next? Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.

Amazon Rethinks Its George Orwell Removal Policy

Peter Kafka in Media on July 17, 2009 at 6:28 pm PT

Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place. Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.

Think You Own the Book You Bought for Your Kindle? You Don’t, Says Amazon.

Peter Kafka in Media on July 17, 2009 at 12:50 pm PT

Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place. What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.