I love Amazon.com. It offers the most pleasant online shopping experience in the world, and its rating and recommendation systems are remarkably good at predicting what you might like. But as the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon.com also has a lot of power over consumers, and last week that translated into a truly Orweillian stunt by Amazon that deleted copies of the e-book 1984 from Kindle devices everywhere.
When I first read the news, I couldn’t believe that books you buy on Kindle could be remotely deleted by Amazon.com — without notice and without your permission. That this actually took place (with the Big Brother book 1984, no less) brings up some very scary realizations about Amazon.com’s Kindle book reader:
• You apparently don’t really own the books you buy through Kindle. You’re just granted a temporary rental at the pleasure of Amazon.com, which may rescind that “right” at any time, without notice.
• If Amazon.com can delete one book off your Kindle (without your knowledge), it could delete them all. What happens when the U.S. government begins banning books (you know, books about freedom, or the U.S. Constitution, or how to make a backyard mortar out of PVC)? Will Amazon.com initiate a global delete process to remove any “illegal” books from your Kindle?
• If Amazon.com can delete books from your Kindle, it also stands to reason that it could modify books on your Kindle without your knowledge! Can you say, “Revisionist history?” One day all the books seem somehow… simplified…
• History is full of Police State governments that banned books and burned books in an attempt to limit the People’s access to knowledge. Is Amazon.com now engaged in digital book burning?
Read article: http://www.naturalnews.com/026675_DRM_Big_Brother_Amazoncom.html
