When Amazon first started selling their Kindles I started thinking of all kinds of problems this could present. Being in the tech field, I tend to do that a lot. Some of my thoughts were things like not being able to share a book with a friend, or losing the chance to float in the pool on a hot summer day and get lost in a book (dropping a $3.00 paperback is a hell of a lot better than dropping a $300 electronic device). Another thing I thought about was giving control of my own library to someone else, and those repercussions are now being felt:

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “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.

And in the biggest irony of them all the books deleted were 1984 and Animal Farm. Funny how Orwell talks about “big brother” in 1984, then his book falls victim to that very same nemesis.

I got to at least give credit to Amazon for refunding the money. A lot of other companies would have just said “oh well” unless forced to by the courts, but this does show a big problem with devices like the Kindle. And while the money did comeback, other things that couldn’t be refunded is lost forever in the binary junk yard:

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Now this is a problem I didn’t originally think of when I was going through “what could go wrong with these Kindles”. Perhaps for his final report he can just say “hey – I lived 1984 over the summer’”. A good teacher should accept that.