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Amazon Offers To Return Pulled Orwell Ebooks
Back in July, Amazon faced public outrage over their decision to delete ebook copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindles of customers who purchased them. Shortly thereafter, CEO Jeff Bezos offered an apology, acknowledging that Amazon handled the situation in a "stupid" and "thoughtless" manner. Now, they're offering something more substantial: anyone who had an ebook deleted can now have it restored, apparently with annotations intact. Any customer who isn't interested in a new copy can get either an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30.
the annotations were stored elsewhere in the kindle but were rather worthless without the context provided by the nearby book-text. They could still be accessed, but weren't much good alone. I.E. you can talk about how This Passage would be good to discuss for My Paper, but without This Passage, your annotation is worthless. So now that the book is returned, hopefully it will be smart enough to tie the old annotation attached to This Passage with the corresponding This Passage in the new text.
The situation originated because Amazon did not have the legal right to distribute copies of 1984 in the first place. They refunded the purchase, but they could hardly turn around and knowingly redistribute illegal copies. I mean, you can rightfully criticize them for the original circumstance, but to be fair it may have taken them 2 months to acquire the rights to legally restore those copies.
I think you're missing a key detail, that the books were pulled because the SELLER (that is: not Amazon) was selling the books illegally via Amazon.
You are mistaken. The publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic version. The copies were sold legitimately from a publisher with the rights to do so. Linky.