Orwell and Dahl on Kindle
Annalee Newitz (in 2009):
Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they’d been downloaded.
[…]
Apparently, until last week, Amazon claimed it wouldn’t take back purchased books[…]
The company has since apologized to its users and promised that it will never happen again, but those steps aren’t enough for some. A lawsuit has been filed in Seattle that seeks class action status for Kindle owners and Orwell readers, alleging that Amazon has done everything from committing computer fraud to eating a high school student’s homework.
One of the plaintiffs, Justin Gawronski, has a compelling story about his experience with Amazon’s memory hole. Apparently, he was reading his copy of 1984 as a summer assignment for school, and had been using one of the Kindle’s selling points—the ability to attach notes to specific parts of the e-book text—to prepare for his return to school. Since he was actively reading the work when Amazon pulled the plug, he actually got to watch the work vanish from his screen. He’s left with a file of notes that are divorced from the text that they reference.
Amazon has agreed to pay $150,000 in a lawsuit filed by Justin Gawronski, who sued the online retailer after George Orwell’s novels ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ were deleted from his Kindle, along with his homework. The money, after going to the law firm representing the teen, will be donated to charity. Gawronski had already been compensated for the loss -- with a $30 gift certificate.
• • •
Ben Ellery and James Beal (via Josh Centers, Hacker News, 3, 4):
Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.
[…]
Yesterday Puffin, the children’s division of Penguin Random House, announced it would publish additional classic editions of the stories with the original texts.
[…]
It said the books will be available alongside the sanitised versions “offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvellous stories.”
But it’s not really a choice if they push updates to the version that you already bought, also potentially breaking existing annotations.
Previously:
