Tolkien on the Kindle

[davem]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

Realistically it doesn't seem likely that Amazon is going to recall my LotR anytime soon. Also realistically, if you are the type of person who is really worried about Amazon having control over what you've bought from them, it's easy enough to figure out how to "jailbreak" your files and make copies. Ahem! -- or so I've heard.

Well, you'd think....

howsumever...

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/te.../18amazon.html

Which wouldn't affect me too much, as I can't think that even with a Kindle I'd buy new books - most of my reading choices are out of copyright anyway.

Of course, there are so many bootleg e-copies of Tolkien's books out there that people could convert via Calibre to the .mobi format that even if Amazon (or Harper Collins) were to withdraw the 'official' copies altogether they'd hardly disappear from Kindles - if only one knew someone with such versions ... (ahem...)