This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
…
You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?
The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”
35 more years until “1984″ enters the public domain!
Yawn.
When you finish with the “maybes” and “what-ifs”, read this:
http://tinyurl.com/mwdasg
It was done poorly – at the request of the publisher.
If you haven’t got it figured out, Stallman has been right all along. This shit will just get worse as time marches on. And this sort of thing is the least of the abuses we’ll see.
But for the moment our sacred history is safe. Why, where would we be without the morally uplifting story about how Andrew Carnegie chopped down the cherry tree and sold the lumber for a profit and how Jesus and John the Baptist used Tang to baptize the Knights Templar at the War of the Rose bowl.