Amazon Offers $30 Credits To Orwell Kindle Swindle Victims
A post on Amazon's Kindle support forum yesterday says the company is sending out emails with offers of $30 to customers who had their George Orwell purchases erased from their devices earlier this summer.
I just received an email from Amazon stating: "As you were one of the customers impacted by the removal of "Works of George Orwell" from your Kindle device in July of this year, we would like to offer you the option to have us re-deliver this book to your Kindle along with any annotations you made. You will not be charged for the book. If you do not wish to have us re-deliver the book to your Kindle, you can instead choose to receive an Amazon.com electronic gift certificate or check for $30." I think Jeff has handled this issue in a most upstanding way. I know it might not appease those who are concerned about how Amazon handles this kind of problem in the future but I feel confident it will be handled in a way that at least I will feel comfortable with.
This is a nice first step, but Amazon still hasn't spelled out in exact terms what it will and will not do in the future with respect to your Kindle purchases. Because of that, it stinks of PR, protect-us-from-a-lawsuit maneuvering and not real progress toward being open with customers. By comparison, note that Amazon has still not made any actual public announcements about the missing details of its user license. (No, they never got back to us on those questions after promising they would.)
We love money, but we love owning the things we paid for even more. Amazon still hasn't made it explicitly clear—via a detailed license agreement—that they will respect that approach to ownership in the future. Our verdict: the Kindle is still an unwise investment if you want to protect your book purchases from evaporating over time.
"$30 From Amazon for Taking My Copy of 'Works of George Orwell'" [Amazon]
(Photo: twirlop)
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Comments:
$30 buys a lot of used paperbacks that Amazon can't take back.
This is why I use a Sony Prs-500. Its not the Newest E-book reader out there, But for $150.00 I was able to buy a New one off ebay last year.
Sony store, Books and Board and several other large ebooks stores give away free ebooks all the time.Sony store routinely give away over 30 Books a month!
I have 5 Memory cards for my Reader. One Christian, One Horror, One Mystery, One Paranormal and One Romance. I organize my books on to their respective Memory cards and Have a Little pouch for my Reader, light and cards. I also got together with two friends and we registered our readers as one family of units. We split the cost of books and take turns choosing. Cuts out costs by a third.
@Oranges w/ Cheese in rainy Central FL: Chris should've found a way to work in the word "vaporize" somehow. Or, would that have been too obvious?
Chris, you should be writing headlines for the New York Post! "Kindle Swindle" would have been a perfect front-page headline.
The Kindle is a swindle to begin with, since it lacks all the good features of books like lack of DRM and reasonable price.
@chatterboxwriting: First, what a mean thing to say. Second, it's not my coinage. DRM-concerned consumers have been using that as a tag on Amazon since the Kindle was first released.
Those annotations are no longer helpful to 99% of the people who made them considering we're in a whole different semester and the assignment has likely come and gone by this point. Bravo.
@cmdrsass: Yeah but will this be done in time to help that kid who lost all his notes in the margins? Even though he could get them all back, he probably already duplicated the effort with a paper book.
@Vandelay Import Export:
I'm putting a Kindle on my Christmas list this year. I don't want to spend my own money to buy one, but I'd love to have one, especially for when I'm traveling. I always have a book on my person, but I'd rather have a bunch of books available to me at any time.
I like the idea of it.
@tbax929: A Sony Librie (or the newere Sony Reader if you don't need a keyboard for annotating) does the job just as well.
@cmdrsass: So you can...what? Set them on top of the Kindle and pretend to read from it? The point is, Kindle users have the right to not only use the product they purchased, but to not have their purchases taken away from them.
Amazon could offer $100 and it wouldn't make any difference. As you point out, it was the sneakiness of the act combined with the fact that it could and will happen again that are so disturbing.
I think the point is, shouldn't have bought a kindle in the first place. DRM media is just that, you have limited use and rights to it, and when it is something linked directly to the distributor, they can take back anything they want or deny you service for whatever reason.
It could be worse... they could have pointed out how much Amazon cares about its customers, and how they want us to think of them not as a faceless corporation out to rid us of our literature, but as more of a big brother we can depend on.
I totally agree with Chris Walters. I'd like to say something nice about Amazon's response, but I can't.
There's no apology and no recognition of Amazon's wrongdoing.
Kindle customers can have the ebook redelivered at no charge - weeks after it was stolen from their devices.
Then what happens? They could be stolen again.
So, you take the $30 and buy a hardback copy of 1984. And you're left with an $300 piece of plastic.
There's an article in the Boston Globe today about a library who is getting rid of all their physical books and replacing them with 18 Kindles/eReaders.
It'll be pretty hilarious if Amazon comes out against libraries loaning Kindles and the school then loses its accreditation.
@Nidoking: Not that I'm aware of.
But then again, I'm a librarian who loans Kindles. I don't ask for a deposit, but I make it very clear that I can bill the borrower if they decide to eat the Kindle.
@consumerfan:
Jeff Bezos apologized for it. Now they are throwing some money to the affected customers.
What more can they do at this point.
I am not a fan of DRM but I love my Kindle. It handy, fast and I really could not care that I can't sell my books back. I just gave them away anyway. I use my kindle to get newspapers, a couple magazine, and books. The paper does not get wasted on newspapers and magazines and after I am done reading them they serve no purpose anyway.
@Saboth: It's the same for music, movies, and software. Even things that don't have DRM written in have ToS or the DMCA saying you can't copy or lend what you should own, or that the license holder has the rights to revoke your ownership privilege at any time.
There's plenty of DRM free material you can put on your Kindle.
@AnthonySc: You're right - he did. Here it is:
This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com
I'll give Jeff the benefit of the doubt and wait to see what happens in practice.
This isn't actually a DRM issue, per se. Amazon accessed users' devices and deleted their content. If the content had been unencrypted, that wouldn't have made things any different.
@outlulz:
That's an interesting conclusion to draw. Would you disagree that the annotations are largely useless at this point?
@robocop_is_bleeding: Ah, secured by credit card, I take it. I can see a convenience factor, but I have to wonder what would happen if more than 18 people wanted to borrow books at once. I'd call them a useful supplement to printed books, but I can't imagine electronic books being a permanent replacement.
@AnthonySc: They can legally promise to never do it again, and disable any technical functionality that allows them to do so.
Screw Amazon. The only thing that should be acceptable is them paying whatever it costs for the rights, and restoring the book to all who bought it.
@oldgraygeek: Actually, I would just take what psm321 wrote above, which is some explicit agreement in their user license that says they will NEVER do this again, and spelling out how "ownership" really works if all you're really getting is a license and they retain control over the digital file.
The Orwell thing was pretty clearly an accident and I get that. I just find it troubling that they haven't addressed it properly.
@tbax929: Even if changing the language to English is a weekend endeavor? (The Librie, not the Reader; it was originally made for Japan). But hey, I think the best electronics are those that are "Some tweaking required".
This isn't an accident and Amazon is not sorry. When you bought the Kindle you knew (or should have known) that you are not buying the books, but the right to read the books on the device. Amazon (I believe) explicitly state that they reserve the rights to remove books from your device without warning.
This is what you agreed to when you bought the device.
@consumerfan: Agreed. If they are REALLY sorry about it then they would modify the Kindle platform to remove any functionality that would ever allow to do something like this again. Until then...I'm not buying a Kindle or any other device like an iPhone that is locked-down in the same way.
Jeff Bezos DID apologize, very specifically, for the removal of these books. Here is the text of his apology:
One thing that's been bothering me about eBook readers, particularly ones that use anything more than a flash card for storage (ie something removable and back-up-able independent of the device):
What's to stop Amazon or Sony from secretly *editing* book contents? This 1984 book thing was noticed because Amazon removed the books and I believe emailed their users. But what if they just edited purchased books, over the wireless? How long would it take to be noticed?
The idea freaks me out.
Heh. Kind of ironic that something like this happened with GEORGE ORWELL novels. Good on Amazon for making it right but the whole idea of them being able to remove books from your device remotely reeks of big brother. LOL.