Stealing Orwell

It’s sad and depressing to watch the book publishing industry work its way through all the mistakes the music industry made in the last decade.

A couple of days ago, Kindle owners who had bought 1984 and Animal Farm from the Kindle store found these books had been deleted from their Kindles and the money credited to their Amazon accounts.

From the point of view of the publishers that apparently insisted on this it seems like an utterly insane move. First, 1984 and Animal Farm are both widely available for free on the internet due to the fact in many areas of the world they’re out of copyright. People had chosen to pay good money for these books, and in return they had those legally purchased books essentially stolen from them. Yes, the money was refunded, but as a commenter on the Pogue story in the NYT points out:

“it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

More than anything else, this is increasing the divide between the object you pay for (the book) and an electronic version of it (the ebook). The object has a resale value, it looks nice on your shelf and it’s price is often heavily discounted if you buy at the right time. The electronic version, on the other hand, has no resale value, you can’t lend it to your friends, there’s no pretty cover to look at and now it turns out you might wake up to find that it’s been taken from you by your over-zealous ebook manufacturer.

Of course, in the film and music industries, they’ve been shooting themselves in their collective feet like this for years. Encumbering the legal purchases DRM that you never find on the version you take for free from the internet, treating the money-paying customers like criminals whilst failing to have the slightest effect on those who are really stealing their work.

It’ll be shame to see publishing companies having their profits squeezed because they haven’t learnt the lessons of the extremely recent past.

Update: Ars are reporting that this is due to the fact that Amazon never had the rights to the books in the first place, and that they’ve adjusted their systems so books won’t be deleted like this in the future. Seems to me that in this case the damage has already been done. Amazon should have had systems in place to ensure that copyrighted material wasn’t being sold through their platform, or what use is their gatekeeper role?