Right there with ya. I’m not against Amazon, by any means. But they’ve got some serious problems they need to work out.
Agreed it has happened, but it is incredibly rare. I am not agreeing with it when they do, but my point it that this as a reason not to buy a Kindle seems silly to me, if a Kindle serves all of your e-reading needs.
I don’t think anybody’s refusing to buy a Kindle because they’re worried that a book they personally have bought may be unfairly removed. It’s as a protest that Amazon do it at all, I believe. Same as, say, not eating in Chick-fil-A as protest against corporate policy.
So the objection is that a service company could retract content? This happens to all service companies.
The objections I generally see are a fear of Amazon removing people’s books at will (usually argued within a Big Brother scenario). This all seems pretty paranoid to me.
Were you aware that Amazon pulled 1984 from Kindles a while back?
Ah, but up until Amazon, book selling hasn’t been a service company. You bought a book. Once you bought it, it’s yours, much the same as if you’d bought a fishing rod or a guitar or a washing machine. If Rickenbacker turn up at your door and say “that guitar you bought from us: we want it back, and you have to give it back”, you’d tell them to go forth and multiply. Amazon basically didn’t let on that when you buy a Kindle book you’re not in any meaningful sense actually buying it – you get to keep it only on sufferance. That is: they’re a service company, and “you get to read these books after paying” is the service that they provide, but they present the product as being books, not the provision of a service. Hence the expectations mismatch when people found out that a thing they thought was a purchase (buying a book) actually turned out to be a service (perpetual and cancellable book “rental”) and thus was surprisingly subject to cessation by Amazon acting unilaterally.
I guess my broader point was that Amazon has now proven they are ruthlessly pursuing profit and willing to take actions that are morally dubious and even potentially unpopular if it means their margins will be improved by doing so. It’s now my opinion that, if in the future it turns out that removing a book or books is in the best interest of their profit motivation, they will not hesitate to do so.
–jeremy
In my entire life, I have bought exactly 2 ebooks. 1 of them was from OReilly, and the other I bought from Kobo which I cannot access anymore. I have no idea why, it may have been a technical glitch, but the fact is it happened. Because this happened and I know first hand that it is a very real possibility, DRM Free is an absolute requirement for me to consider buying an ebook right now, and since no publisher besides OReilly offers that I’m sticking to print until publishers come to their senses.
I’m not being paranoid. If I’m paying as much or almost as much as a print book for an ebook, I am paying for a copy of the book not access to it. It is simply not worth it for me in the case of the latter.
I would have called you a paranoid lunatic for saying things like that, and that’s no doubt what @jonobacon is thinking right now. Until the Hachette thing. Now… I’m more inclined to believe that you’re right.
To be clear… I’d not have thought it myself before the Hachette thing.
–jeremy
Hang on a second, are you telling me that I don’t own a copy the book I buy and that I am instead only purchasing unlimited access to the book?
I was under the impression that you own a copy of the book and it is yours to use and read as much as you like.
If this is the case, I agree, that this is unacceptable.
According to the Kindle Terms of Use,
Use of Kindle Content.
Upon your download of Kindle Content and payment of any applicable fees (including applicable taxes), the Content Provider grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Kindle Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Supported sevices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.
It is, isn’t it? See @ssweeny’s quote of the terms of use, and bear in mind that if you’d actually been sold a book so that you own it, Amazon wouldn’t be allowed to take it away afterwards.
Damn…well I never!
How does this compare to actual books? Is there a similar license in the sense that the content in the book is for personal, non-commercial use but you get to keep the paper?
If the Kindle is indeed different, I totally agree this is not cool.
If you purchase a book, it’s yours. Obviously the author and publisher retain copyright in the words, but they do not have the right to confiscate the purchased book off you once you’ve bought it, even given their ownership if the intellectual property therein. Think of car part recalls; Toyota put out notices saying “bring your car back in and we’ll fix it”. They don’t, and can’t, demand that you return it to them for fixing, because you bought it and you own it, not them. Amazon have taken the idea that you only license a thing from the software world and have applied it to books, and nobody even noticed.
Indeed. Now, while I only have an intellectual objection to this (it isn’t going to stop me using a Kindle), how has this not been a bigger and more well publicized issue?
Without wishing to be overly offensive here, it’s not a bigger deal because
(a) a handsome ginger protestor and his multi-billionaire inventor playboy friend from the Avengers say “man, buying books from the Kindle web store is not necessarily a good idea because they can take your books away. They even took away 1984 from people, for god’s sake. Don’t buy from Amazon!”
(b) the randomly chosen guitar-playing community manager member of the public to whom they are speaking says “no way; that’s incredibly rare. I don’t see why that’s ever going to happen to me. You’re just another paranoid free software loser who probably also thinks that I shouldn’t use Fedora because it’s got wifi firmware in it. Begone, neckbeard”
Fortunately some members of the public are prepared to listen to extra argument and end up convinced, hooray, nice one jono… but most aren’t, or the protestor guy doesn’t get the chance to make the second argument.
The 1984 thing was a big and well publicized issue – https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=amazon+remove+1984 shows it in the NYT, the Guardian, and so on – but it was in 2009, and how quickly we forget.
Are you implying that Amazon is more concerned about their stockholders than ME??? I’m shocked! 
The have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the best interest of their stockholders. Every public company has to strike a balance between current shareholder profit and treating customers well while maintaining trust (which helps ensure future shareholder profit). It typically does not end well in the long term for companies that forget the latter.
–jeremy
Right, but the challenge here in my mind is that that issue was (I think) largely interpreted by the general public as a weird neckbeard thing. I don’t think the issue has been translated into something the consumer cares about and is assumed to be something for paranoid lunatics.
I am astonished that this has not become a much bigger issue…