De-kindle: The arrogant removal of what was thought, by the purchaser, to be a legitimate purchase by ‘Big Brother’ technology
Amazon’s Kindle as most will know is a portable, electronic device for reading books. It differs from most of its competitors by the fact that it attached to to a wifi system, so that books can be downloaded through the air ways. It has the plus that as you commute to work you can also import sections of newspapers and magazines.
In the last week purchasers of two of George Orwell’s books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four, have suddenly found that the books have been removed from their Kindles and their accounts reimbursed the outrageous $9.99 charged for the books.
There used to be one good reason not to buy a Kindle, but this now gives me two reasons:
You don’t own what you buy
OK the reason that the books were withdrawn, removed, deleted, erased, eliminated or de-Kindled is that the publisher has decided that they do not want to sell electronic versions of these books. Fair enough. In future no copies of these books should be sold. But these have already been sold.
From Friday the 17th of July, the ‘De-Kindle Day, Amazon should have put the block on the books, removed the books from the catalogue and that would have been that.
But what is objectionable is that the many people have paid their $9.99 for one of the books. They have downloaded it. They maybe half way through reading the books. As they have bought the product then they should be entitled to use the product.
The publisher and Amazon should have been professional enough, business like enough and ethical enough to accept that they had entered a legal contract:
- with an offer to trade, the Amazon online catalogue
- an agreement, obviously both Amazon and the purchaser went through the purchasing process without mishaps
- a consideration, Amazon charges the purchaser’s credit card, the purchaser gets the book
In addition Amazon and the publisher must have had a mutually beneficial contract or Amazon would not have had e-book version of the books.
Now if the purchaser had gone to a book shop and purchased a book, which maybe sold at a discount, which the publisher decided was wrong. Would it be right for someone from Amazon to climb through a window into the purchaser’s house, remove the book and leave a pile of money in its place. I think not.
E-books are drastically overpriced
Kindle and other e-reader systems are aimed at selling electronic versions of books with all sorts of levels of security. So when you have an e-novel or e-business book it is difficult to transfer the book to other systems in the way that a p-book, book printed on paper, can be handed around or lent to others.
If you look at the price of these main stream e-book sales we find that they are priced, generally, only slightly less than a conventional p-book. E-books costs are low compared to a p-book costs as that have to be printed, stored, distributed, put onto shelves into book shops, with high commercial rents and business taxes, managed by dedicated employees, who get paid, admittedly a pittance.
The publishers and the distributors of e-books are clearly exploiting, unreasonably, the early adopters of this e-reading technology. The are holding back the development of this new technology as many, such as myself, feel the whole thing is overpriced.
Implications
I am deeply concerned that this move by Amazon will be the start of a trend. If Amazon gets away with this, then others will follow.
Nobody reads the terms and conditions of software downloaded on their computers. Once a package is installed on a computer, laptop or mobile phone you just use it.
However, if condition in the small print section 199, paragraph XiV, clause c which states the the vendor, large, greedy corporation, has the right to remove said piece of software:
- after three years, unless payment is made
- providing purchaser does not use a competitor’s software
- annoys vendor’s support team
Conclusion
Amazon has changed the rules. E-books bought through the Kindle are no longer a direct sale. The sale can be terminated at any time by Amazon and the poor bloody user has no other option but to accept it.
Commercial e-books are over priced and the greed, and short sightedness, of publishers and distributors are harming the development of the e-book market.
Picture Credits
Image on Flickr by UnusualImage
Almost 9,000 quality images of quality graffiti.