Nineteen Eighty-Four

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.

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.