On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said. Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.” “It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.” Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.Īmazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.Īmazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”Īntoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices and apparently to make them vanish.Īn authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.” An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.ĭigital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Herdener said.Ĭustomers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea.

Animal farm 1984 hardcover