KNOW THIS: E-Books Update: Amazon’s Disappearing E-Books Debacle
August 6, 2009
Other articles in this Know Something Project series:
E-Books: Where Literature and Technology Meet (June 2009)
E-Books Update: Pricing and Release Date Debates (July 2009)
Even among book lovers with no interest in—or even disdain for—e-books, news that Amazon deliberately deleted certain titles from hundreds of Kindles a few weeks ago got A LOT of attention. And most of it wasn’t pretty.
On Friday, July 17, the The Wall Street Journal ran the article “Kindle’s Orwellian Moment” while The New York Times ran “Some E-books are More Equal than Others,” followed the next day by “Amazon Erases Orwell Books from Kindle.” All these pieces reported on Amazon’s July 16 removal of George Orwell novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm not only from the Kindle Store, but from privately owned Kindles.
Amazon explained that affected users’ accounts were immediately credited with the cost of the original purchases and insisted the move was made for a legitimate reason: Neither the third-party publisher of the electronic versions of the books, MobileReference.com, nor its parent company, SoundTells LLC, owned the rights to publish the Orwell books in any form. When this came to light, Amazon opted to remove as many of the illegal copies of the e-titles as possible, including those they could access on customers’ Kindles via its wireless Whispernet service.
Too close to Big Brother’s instant access to everything personal, many protested, including directly impacted folks who voiced their frustrations and fears on Kindle forums. In response to these and many other concerns about limited consumer control over e-texts “purchased” through the Kindle Store (What if a book becomes so controversial a publisher decides to pull all copies from circulation? What if some higher authority decides a book ought to be banned?), Amazon quickly promised never to remove digital products from customers’ devices—at least not under similar circumstances.
Is such a promise necessary? Do consumers “own” electronic books, or do e-book retailers only “license access” to such versions? Did Amazon deny the rights of their customers, or do all consumers need to adjust their expectations of what exactly a digital purchase entails?
To many, Amazon simply messed up. The folks at CrunchGear noted that in the case of a “physical” book that had been published incorrectly for whatever reason, a publisher might understandably ask a customer to return the book for a refund or replacement. Come into the customer’s home and take the book, however, and you’ve crossed a line.
So a lack of trust combined with faulty/no customer communication contributed to the problem, but so, some argue, did a lack of quality control. In a July 18 post that defended Amazon to a point, the always-intriguing iReaderReview (also known as Kindle Review) stated what many seem to have overlooked: The root of the problem in this particular case lay in a faulty system that allowed an unauthorized publisher to sell pirated copies of digital works on a retail site as widely recognized and accessed as the Kindle Store.
Simply a glitch in a new system that needs considerable attention or an inexcusable breach that’s likely to happen many times over again?
By July 20, the issue had resulted in more than a few thought-provoking blog posts. In one, Medialoper questioned “Amazon’s control (or lack thereof) over its own marketplace,” raising questions regarding Amazon’s true ability (and willingness) to review every single e-book submitted for sale in the Kindle Store. Is such a move required if Amazon hopes to reassure concerned consumers that every e-book sold in the Kindle Store is legitimate and won’t ever be pulled? Perhaps more to the point: How can Amazon considerably increase its oversight of all e-books offered via the Kindle Store (and thereby reassure e-book consumers over time) while also building its collection at the mind-boggling rate required if it’s to maintain a top spot in the e-book universe, especially when the competition will soon include the likes of Google?
Rebuilding trust also may require Amazon to be much more blunt than it has been about the realities of e-book purchases. In its July 22 article “Why Did Big Brother Remove Paid-For Content from Amazon’s Kindles?” The Guardian referred to the book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor of internet law. In it, “Zittrain warned that devices to store data and code are increasingly becoming information appliances that are controlled by the manufacturer, not the user—precisely the situation the Kindle has presented.”
But what if consumers were made more aware of this new type of arrangement? Would that be enough? Probably not, due to what Zittrain calls “the deeper problem”: the ability of powers that be—whether product manufacturers or distributors or any type of regulatory authority—to revise the rules at any time. For this reason, he argues, “protections should be built into the core of new technologies” with consumers’ best interests in mind, not fought for after the fact.
A week after the inciting incident, on July 23, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted this apology on a Kindle forum:
“This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four 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.”
The same day, The New York Times ran a lengthy piece, “Amazon Reports Lower-Than-Expected Sales,” while Publishers Weekly posted “North American Media Sales Flat at Amazon.” The bottom line? Amazon’s profits fell 10 percent in its second quarter, due primarily to a $51 million settlement after a long legal battle with Toys R Us. But analysts said they were even more concerned about the company’s flat sales of media such as books, music, and DVDs, the core business that launched Amazon into the online retail stratosphere early on.
The irony in this (as though this story needs more irony): On the same day the Amazon CEO apologized to those who prefer to purchase “digital alternatives” such as the e-books offered in the Kindle Store—alternatives that cost less than their “physical counterparts”—the media drew attention to growing concerns that such sales “might be weakening one of the core drivers of Amazon’s business.” Or does the not-so-coincidental irony lie in the fact that Bezos posted his apology on a recently volatile customer forum on the same day his company reported less-than-ideal second-quarter results that made analysts who’d supposed Amazon to be above the impact of the current recession question that assumption for the first time?
A few days later on July 26, The New York Times followed up with “Amazon Faces a Fight over its E-Books” that shed new light on just how upset the disappearing e-books debacle had made some concerned citizens. According to the article, “civil libertarians and customer advocates” are calling for Amazon to change the way it sells books for the Kindle due to the possibility the company may “be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case—or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.” In response to these concerns, Boston-based Free Software Foundation is circulating a petition to academic and publishing types in hopes of asking/demanding in the very near future that Amazon relinquish all control over any e-books purchased and downloaded from the Kindle Store onto Kindle readers.
Even if Amazon were to agree to do this and more to appease all its current and potential customers, a July 30 Wall Street Journal report and a July 31 Los Angeles Times piece made it clear Amazon’s “Orwellian moment” is not going to fade from the general public’s memory anytime soon. A Detroit-area high school senior has filed a suit against Amazon in federal court “to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles” and to seek “monetary relief” for those who “lost work from the incident.” While the student’s notes and annotations regarding his summer reading assignment, Nineteen Eighty-Four, were not deleted, they now “refer back to nothing.” The student’s stated goal in filing the lawsuit reportedly extends beyond compensation to helping “move the industry forward” by making sure others aren’t deceived into believing they own something when they really don’t.
A concern which dovetails nicely with the point of view of the Guardian column “No Apology Necessary, Jeff: Why Amazon’s Orwellian Book Grab was Completely Justified,” a piece that took what some might call a sensible and almost-but-not-quite-completely-pro-Amazon stance. What it really offered, however, was a pro-content-creator stance as it argued that purchasing a book in any format gives one access to the content printed within that book, not “the right to own the content.”
What is really purchased in the case of a text sale is the license “to read and enjoy the words and ideas that remain the property of someone else—usually the author who has licensed them to the publisher.” When a copyright expires, the work previously protected by it enters the public domain and is “owned by everyone.” (Interestingly enough, not every country around the globe requires the same numbers of years to pass for a copyright to expire, a confusing fact which some suggest may have led to the appearance of possibly unintentional pirated copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm in the Kindle Store years before their copyrights will expire in the U.S. It seems each Kindle publisher’s country of origin may represent yet another detail quality assurance folks at Amazon should start tracking.)
A sale of a copyrighted work by a person who does not own the right to sell the work constitutes “the intellectual equivalent of handling stolen goods,” according to The Guardian. While in the past the purchase of a pirated copy of a text (or CD or DVD) could not be easily tracked, new technology like e-books and wireless readers allow copyright owners to not only learn who’s purchased a pirated copy, but to contact those consumers (as Amazon ought to have done up front, many argue) and reclaim what only they are legally allowed to sell in the first place. While offering a polite refund or replacement, of course.
But many argue that civil liberties and consumer rights are hardly protected when such quick fixes to individual problems are applied only on an as-needed basis, and that with the deletion of the Orwell books (and earlier but less-publicized deletions of illegally sold Kindle copies of Ayn Rand and J.K. Rowling works), a dangerous precedent has been set. In “Why 2024 will be like Nineteen Eighty-Four,” one Slate columnist recently suggested that in a paperless future in which “all books exist as files on servers,” works could be completely wiped out with relative ease—and far beyond the reach of the traditional “anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned art.”
—Karen DeGroot Carter
Many of the articles and blog posts that explored the Kindle disappearing e-books debacle referred in one way or another to Digital Rights Management concerns, but DRM has also been dismissed by some as a root problem in this particular case. Look for notes on both points of view as well as a discussion of DRM and DPP (Digital Personal Property) in an upcoming Know Something Project E-Books article.
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