Last Friday Amazon auto-deleted 2 ebooks from customers’ Kindles. The publisher decided that it did not want to produce electronic versions of the books after all, and Amazon complied with its kill request. Customers did get an automatic refund.

The books? “Animal Farm” and “1984″ by George Orwell.

You’re familiar with the quotation “of making many books there is no end”. Actually Bowker says that there were more than 275,000 books printed last year alone. Now of all of those books, what are the odds that “1984″ gets automatically deleted from an ebook reader because of a policy snafu? You just can’t make this stuff up.

Some bloggers went over the top with their reactions. I liked David Pogue’s comments, however:

“… we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.”

UPDATE, July 24: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says the company’s actions were “stupid”. (Via NYT.)

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on July 20, 2009 - 9:14 am

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