This thing popped up last night, but I just needed some time to process.
Amazon—in a move ironic enough to be the lead in the above-linked New York Times story on the subject—remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm after they were reported to have been posted to Amazon’s Kindle website by a publisher who did not own the rights to the publications. According to the Times article, similar deletions have happened for other books in the recent past, so it’s a safe bet that the Orwell books are mostly garnering this attention because of the context.
The Kindle is an electronic device about the size of a pad of paper, on which digital versions of books, magazines and newspapers can be purchased and downloaded via WiFi. The customers in question were refunded the purchase cost of the books, but many weren’t content with that, given the seemingly intrusive way that Amazon removed the already-downloaded products from their devices.
One wonders if the ability to remotely delete forged, pirated or otherwise unpublishable material might be harnessed and used for something like Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited program. While many readers have complained that Marvel doesn’t allow for downloading of the books, it might be a practice that’s less undesirable to them if it were put into a context where the publisher and the vendor have all (or at least most) of the control over the content. This would presumably increase the number of readers willing to give it a chance, as I’ve always thought the inability to take the product and walk away with it is part of what makes customers hesitant to try the program (certainly the case for me).
The other side of that, of course, and the wider issue, is that if publishers and retailers can remotely remove offending material, is this something that we’ll see improving the penetration of digital comics in general? There are a lot of books out there that are downloaded by bittorrent far more than they’re legally purchased, and one has to wonder if the knowledge that such unauthorized products can be quickly and easily removed from the marketplace will lead publishers to be more interested in this avenue—or just alienate readers who might feel they always have to be on the lookout for someone who might swoop in and delete their purchases. While Amazon has conceded maybe the Orwell deletions weren’t the best idea in the world, and claim to be changing their system so that downloaded items won’t be automatically removed in the future, it seems unlikely—for legal reasons, if nothing else—that they’ll change the Terms of Service. Could Amazon even justify such a change if they wanted to? It would seen like a huge disincentive to publishers and intellectual property holders to work with the company. So they may be simply putting into place a system that’s inherently flawed—where policy says one thing about standards and another about execution. In that case, it’s really only a matter of time—or the threat of a lawsuit—that will cause a reversion to the policy that saw customers stripped of their bootleg books this week.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
“it might be a practice that’s less undesirable to them if it were put into a context where the publisher and the vendor have all (or at least most) of the control over the content.”
Umm, that’s the exact reason why it’s so undesirable: the consumer has no control over the content at all. As it stands, Marvel can simply remove any book from their digital service that they no longer want people to have.
Obviously, until this, Kindle users *thought* they had more control. But this looks like it could be an isolated incident, and it only involves versions of books that should’ve never be available in the first place. It doesn’t surprise me that Amazon handled this poorly, but they show a willingness to learn from this.
No, the problem with Marvel’s digital service is not only lack of consumer control, it’s also lack of availability of new titles. Would anybody buy a Kindle if they could only buy books that were printed 5 years ago or more? Of course not.