Now comes news that shows my initial abhorence was spot on. Apparently Amazon didn't get its ducks in a row before it offered several George Orwell novels for download as ebooks. So instead of working out the situation with the copyright holders, what did Amazon do? It unilaterally deleted copies of the books from subscribers' Kindles. Now Amazon is facing a class action lawsuit.
One of the plaintiffs, Justin Gawronski, has a compelling story about his experience with Amazon's memory hole. Apparently, he was reading his copy of 1984 as a summer assignment for school, and had been using one of the Kindle's selling points—the ability to attach notes to specific parts of the e-book text—to prepare for his return to school. Since he was actively reading the work when Amazon pulled the plug, he actually got to watch the work vanish from his screen. He's left with a file of notes that are divorced from the text that they reference.
So even though Amazon claimed you would always have the books that you bought (even if something happens to your Kindle reader), that turns out to be false. The company can delete the books at will. The Orwell incident (ironic, isn't it?) isn't the only case where the company can take away your books when it wants. Earlier this year, it came out that Amazon can delete your Kindle account whenever it wants to. One Amazon customer found that out the hard way when he made one too many returns.
So what happens when your Kindle account is taken away? Your Kindle still works, and the books you already bought for it will work, but you can't download those books ever again (better have made a backup on your PC!), you can't receive your magazine, blog, or newspaper subscriptions on it anymore, you can't email documents to Amazon to have them converted and sent to your Kindle, and you can't buy any new books for the device. That $360 device only works so long as Amazon decides it will work.
All of this just proves my point even more: they'll never take away my books.
