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Jeff Bezos Offers Apology For Erasing 1984
levicivita writes "From the down-but-not-out NYT comes an article (warning: login may be required) about user backlash against Kindle's embedded DRM: 'Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell's "1984" were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices. Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon's "'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles."' Bezos's post is here."
Slightly offtopic, but many people don't know Orwell's original introduction to the Animal Farm was censored because it was anti-Soviet. It's a telling sign of how easy it is to get the entire media to wholly invest in obvious lies at the order of government and business interests. The enemy of my enemy...
The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicized with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. To name only one instance, the BBC celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army without mentioning Trotsky. This was about as accurate as commemorating the battle of Trafalgar without mentioning Nelson, but it evoked no protest from the English intelligentsia. In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/Orwell.html
In any case, you can get a free copy of 1984 and Animal Farm without any DRM from Gutenberg Australia
http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
You won't break any Australian laws by downloading it, but the laws where you are may be different.
This was clearly the wrong action in this case, but it's worth remembering why they built this capability in the first place: so people can get refunds if they one-click the wrong book. That's something that they can't do without a remote-deletion capability.
BTW, you know, you don't have to leave the wireless on. And it reads unencrypted Mobipocket books with ease. And there's the Magic Catalog of Project Gutenberg E-books that will allow you to download any Gutenberg ebook directly to your kindle, free, via the wireless web interface.
Kindle books can be bought anonymously by using a throwaway email account with gift certificates (available from any Western Union location aka your nearest gas station, or via those Coinstar coin-counting machines, which don't charge a percentage if you get a gift card), and most of them can have their DRM stripped with ease (mobidedrm is what you're looking for; it's a painful process that works for the Kindle, when you're Googling.)