Whose Kindle Is It Anyway?

How much of every Kindle does Amazon own after it is sold? You may be a bit confounded by this question. But every Kindle owner, who downloaded either of George Orwell’s famous books Nineteen Eighty-four or Animal Farm, or both, must have that question on their mind. Amazon left Orwell-doting Kindle owners nonplussed after it remotely deleted the above-mentioned novels from their Kindles.

Although it has sent them a refund, such overbearing behavior on its part can not be brooked. Amazon is said to have acted at the publisher’s behest. Amazon labeled it a “rare” occurrence. The entire episode feels like a harbinger of worse things to follow to this author. Will digital distribution and cloud computing leave us with only nominal ownership rights in the future?

Update: As the Wall Street Journal reports, "The issue, says Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener, is that the Orwell books had been added to the company’s catalog using a self-service platform by a third party that did not actually have rights to sell the books. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said."

Amazon's puchasing system automatically removed the books from Kindles after the company realized that they were selling illegal copies of the book. In the future, though, Amazon has vowed to change its system to prevent the automatic removal of content from customers' Kindles. This still begs the question of why Amazon had a system to retract purchased content in the first place.