Mysterious George Orwell refunds

Or Amazon revoked part of Thomas' post before you read it. Check your e-mail for a refund notice.

:)

I also had 1984 taken off of my Kindle 2. I haven't received any refund....no notice. This is insane.....

Those will probably be pulled too, if in fact the works are still under copyright.

Thomas Palmer: I agree - I think they didn't bother to, y'know, actually find out what the facts really are. It's the kind of superficial "reporting" that passes for journalism these days. They are handed a few facts, they let their imagination color those facts into a "story," based on their assumptions. I'm to the point where if I see it in the NYT, I wonder just how wrong they've got it this time...

My theory is that Amazon's email message contains an ambiguity: its reference to the Publisher is not a reference to the publisher of the deleted book, but rather, to the legitimate Publisher of the book. I think the legitimate Publisher complained to Amazon, & Amazon deleted the pirated book. And I don't think that the NYT bothered to find out if that was the case.

let me know if u find out...

Who reads all the fine print that the lawyers add to all that we buy. We assume that we are dealing with a reputable company and that they won't screw their customers. It's very disturbing that they can delete content from your Kindle. And that they did! It makes me mad. I have a Kindle and don't want them messing with it's content. I feel betrayed. Now I actually want my money back and will send them back the Kindle.

IMHO this is rather worrisome. OK so maybe the copies were illegal and sold to Kindle users by mistake. I am not sure of the details. A "good PR" move would have been for Amazon to compensate the publishers for the illegal copies and in effect make them legal for the users who already bought them. Amazon deleting the copies off the users device is a PR disaster that will rightfully blow up in their faces. It's as simple as that, if they want to convince the public that their ebooks are "as good as books" they need to take this seriously. Folks really don't need glaring examples like this that the Kindle is in fact a "big brother" device.

I'm not willing to pay for books that can be either repossessed or edited to suit someone else's agenda after the fact.

Here are the literary works that MobileReference.com now lists on its website -- note the absence of recent works that might be under copyright, including Orwell's.
FICTION, NONFICTION and POETRY:
American Literary Classics:
Louisa May Alcott
L. Frank Baum
Ambrose Bierce
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Willa Cather
Kate Chopin
James Fenimore Cooper
Emily Dickinson
Frederick Douglass
Theodore Dreiser
Benjamin Franklin
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Elbert Hubbard
Zora Neale Hurston
Washington Irving
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Peter B. Kyne
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Jack London
H. P. Lovecraft
Herman Melville
Edgar Allan Poe
Upton Sinclair
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Henry David Thoreau
Mark Twain
Lewis Wallace
Edith Wharton
Walt Whitman
British Literary Classics:
Jane Austen
J. M. Barrie
William Blake
Anne Bronte
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Lewis Carroll
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Wilkie Collins
Joseph Conrad
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Elizabeth Gaskell
Thomas Hardy
Jerome K. Jerome
Rudyard Kipling
Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Beatrix Potter
Anna Sewell
William Shakespeare
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Robert Louis Stevenson
Alfred Lord Tennyson
William Makepeace Thackeray
H. G. Wells
Ellen Wood
French Literary Classics:
Honoré de Balzac
Gustave Flaubert
Victor Hugo
Alexandre Dumas
Gaston Leroux
Guy de Maupassant
Marquis de Sade
Jules Verne
Emile Zola
Voltaire
Russian Literary Classics:
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alexander Pushkin
Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Turgenev
Russian Short Stories
World Literary Classics:
Hans Christian Andersen
Miguel de Cervantes
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Brothers Grimm
Hermann Hesse
Henrik Ibsen
James Joyce
Lucy Maud Montgomery
George Bernard Shaw
Sir Walter Scott
Johanna Spyri
Bram Stoker
Jonathan Swift
Oscar Wilde
Cao Xueqin
Mystery & Crime:
Arthur Conan Doyle
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Agatha Christie
Wilkie Collins
Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Classic Mystery Collection
Sherlock Holmes
Ancient authors:
Aeschylus
Aesop
Julius Caesar
Cicero
Homer
One Thousand and One Nights
Ovid
Petronius
Sophocles
Virgil
Medieval literature:
Dante Alighieri
Geoffrey Chaucer
Thomas Malory
Children Classics:
Aesop
Hans Christian Andersen
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Arabian Nights Entertainments
Brothers Grimm
Beatrix Potter
Johanna Spyri

Okay....a link would have sufficed, but thanks for the info. ;)

Just a guess, but I would imagine this "publisher" grabbed these two books from Project Gutenberg in Australia, and re-sold through the Amazon store. Sold, until someone notified them, and Amazon, that the books are still under copyright in the United States.

Badly handled? Big time. I rarely connect to Amazon now, and make sure I back what I have up, first. But I imagine both organizations (the so-called "publisher", and Amazon) were threatened with major lawsuits (the copyright owner of 1984 in the States is extremely litigious).

But this does point out the vulnerability of Whispernet.

Nor exactly. It's as though you bought the book at Barnes and Noble, then Barnes and Noble showed up in your living room, took the book off the shelf, and left you a check. As a Kindle user, I find this very, very creepy.

Mobile Reference (mobi) appears to sell public domain books for the kindle, as that is most of their library.

However, 1984 and Animal Farm are not public domain.

Neither are several of the ebooks they have listed for GK Chesterton - only some of his works are public domain in the US. Ignatius Press is the only US publisher I know of with rights for his later works.

If Mobile Reference did not have authorization to publish these as ebooks, they were pirating the books, and Amazon customers buying those books were receiving stolen goods.

Shelley R Powers says:
the copyright owner of 1984 in the States is extremely litigious
------------------------------------------------------------

Not questioning your statement, but I was wondering how you know this, or where you came up with this assumption? Just genuinely curious, that's all, as I've never heard of who actually owns the copyright's.

Another example. Try to imagine if Apple started using iTunes to delete pirated music off of peoples PC's. Folks would be LIVID over such as invasion, even if the music downloads were illegal. Amazon wants to be a trusted vendor of ebooks and wants folks to trust their Kindles as they would a regular book. This violates that trust. They should have found a solution SHORT of deleting content off of the Kindles. Bad move.

No one was actually in your house. That is a big difference that can't be overlooked.

Look, one way to prevent Amazon from EVER accessing your Kindle's content is to simply not ever use the Whispernet function. I know, I know, why should anyone NOT use a function that was so highly advertised, and is a huge draw for purchasing a Kindle in the fisrt place. But, it's THAT simple. Buy a book from Amazon via your computer, and then download that book to your computer, and transfer it to your Kindle via a USB connection - simple. It's the same as downloading music and transferring them to your mp3 palyer. That way, Amazon will NEVER have access to your content ever again. Allow them the access and yes, they will use that access at their discretion obviously. Give'em an inch.....ah, you get the idea.

I didn't receive a check.

It doesn't matter IMHO. The correct PR way to handle this would have been to inform the buyers they had bought a illegal copy, in effect admitting an unavoidable screw up had occurred, and advise them to delete it with the offer to sell them a legit copy after refunding their money. Then go after the original source of the illegal copies. Amazon may have bought publisher trust with this move but seriously violated consumer trust.

"Another example. Try to imagine if Apple started using iTunes to delete pirated music off of peoples PC's. Folks would be LIVID over such as invasion, even if the music downloads were illegal." by Postcall

If itunes was the one selling the illegal music then I can see them doing the same thing. We aren't talking about Amazon removing illegal book obtained elsewhere, we are talking about Amazon removing illegal books that they sold. I, for one, want Amazon to have a good relationship with publishers so I can buy the books I want. Amazon cannot sell books that are obtained illegally and keep that relationship. So I think Amazon has to do this to maintain their relationship. Publisher's biggest fear is piracy, Amazon cannot just pretend nothing happened.

Due process, or closed doors?

Various people have said that if this content were pirated, it would be OK for amazon to take it away, same as if the property were stolen and the courts authorized the police to take it back. Thing is, there is a huge difference: in one case, the courts are involved and actually authorize an action, with public notice and the possibility of public involvement, and in the other case, a couple of private companies take action behind closed doors. I really don't care why amazon did it. Unless they have a court order requiring them to recall this property, they bloody well shouldn't. That's why we have a bloody legal system.

The biggest problem here is that amazon can unilaterally remove content without advance public notice and advance public debate.

Example of why this is a problem: imagine I'm a kid about to do a book report on Animal Farm and planning to do some last minute reading. Or I'm about to go overseas (where whispernet can't reach), so have 1984 loaded up because I've always been meaning to read it. Or I have some evidence that the copyright holder no longer has copyright -- perhaps a letter from Orwell stating that 1984 is in the public domain -- so I could tell the court not to force the publisher to recall it. Public notice and public debate are a very good thing. As bad as our legal system is, it beats not having one.

When I buy a book, I own it. Today i find that when I 'buy' a kindle book, I am leasing it and it is subject to recall by the issuer. Today, recall reasons revolve around illegality of editions; tomorrow's reasons could be 'socially' or worse, 'politically unacceptable' - similar to removing 'gay' books from libraries in some less-progressive states or the banning (aka burning) of books by progressive and most often Jewish writers and intellectuals in 1930s Nazi Germany. When you put the ownership of thoughts (including past masterpieces) into the hands of Corporations, we move closer to the situation that Orwell alluded to in his writing. What will I do - put my kindle in the closet, dig out my purchased hard copies and require anyone who wants them back to try and cross my threshold.

[Deleted by the author on Jul 17, 2009 3:34:45 PM PDT]

I was thinking about getting a Kindle. Now, I think not.
If the publisher can change their minds and take a legally purchased/rented for eternity book back, then I want no part of e-books. If Amazon is not assuring legality of offering particular books before making them available, then they're not worthy as a provider, and I want no part of Amazon e-books. Either way, it's the reader/purchaser that gets taken advantage of. Either way, I'm not interested.

"If itunes was the one selling the illegal music then I can see them doing the same thing. We aren't talking about Amazon removing illegal book obtained elsewhere, we are talking about Amazon removing illegal books that they sold."

As I said earlier IF Amazon sold illegal copies then it was up to Amazon to compensate the publisher for their (Amazon's) mistake. It's about trust, as a consumer I need to be able to trust that Amazon is a reliable vendor. A reliable vendor doesn't sell illegal products and if they do they EAT their mistake. When I buy a song from iTunes I am trusting the Apple is selling me a legit product.

Indeed Apple once sold me the incorrect copy of a movie through iTunes, they corrected it by providing me with the correct copy and what's more they did NOT delete the original, it still worked but I deleted it myself. That's what a vendor worthy of my trust does.