Bezos apologizes for Kindle 1984 memory hole blunder

Posted today on the Kindle Community page at Amazon.com:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Sounds sincere. Of course, now Amazon needs to walk the walk.

An Apology from Amazon

Previously:

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

More at Boing Boing

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wolfiesma

Let’s distinguish between nuclear bombs and data deletion. They are not the same thing. Not even close. Data deletion and accidentally killing an infant are also not even remotely in the same league. I guess I’m just not that anti-corporate when it comes down to it. We all rank it differently, but personally, I put the bomb makers and the earth rapers at one end of the chart, and Amazon and, I don’t know, Yahoo at the other end.

I’m just sayin, let’s keep things in perspective. That’s all.
Anonymous

Never wanted a Kindle, and most certainly never will get a Kindle. My $10 paperbacks are well-nigh indestructible beyond things like immersion in puddles and sudden chainsaws, and even then they can survive the puddle, even if they end up a bit warped.

If I lose it, it’s just $10. If for some reason there is a thief out there who -really- likes my taste in books, I’m only out $10.

Books never run out of battery power, they can be used to light a fire in an emergency AND THEY DON’T GET TAKEN AWAY BY THE MAN.

Books beat Kindle, and they always will.

And anyone who disagrees, let’s have a fight. You break out your Kindle, and I’ll use my hardcover copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. We’ll see who can knock the other out first.
styrofoam

Do people understand the way that the kindle stores files in the cloud? This is kind of a side effect of how magazine subscriptions work.

You Amazon account has a bit of storage in the cloud. This is how the “any book you ever buy will always be downloadable again” thing works. (or is, uh, supposed to work.)

When your Kindle wireless is on, it reaches out to the cloud, and asks which books the user owns, and which ones the user has asked to push out to the kindle. (You can delete an item from your kindle, log onto Amazon, and push a “send to my kindle” button.)

Occasionally, the kindle will reach out to Amazon and say, “what’s in my library, and what’s been removed from my library?”

IN MOST CASES, these changes are due to either manipulations you’ve made in your library, or some automatic shuffling going around in updated blogs or magazines.

IN THIS CASE, amazon deleted the file FROM THE CLOUD, because they deleted all instances of this book. They didn’t delete it from Kindles, per se.

Now, a kindle phones home, sees that a cloud managed piece of data isn’t there, and deletes it.
I think this is a unintended side-effect of the way subscriptions and periodicals and cloud-management of your account is supposed to work- but it didn’t come across that way. Amazon probably felt or negotiated a clause in which they’d delete the offending copies from THEIR servers, in order to placate the publisher- but that had the side effect of making the copies dissappear from kindles that auto-synched.

If you had your wireless turned off since the brouhaha started, it’s very possible that you could have hooked the kindle up to your computer via USB, transferred the file to your computer, and had a copy that would never disappear. it might keep vanishing when you synched, but you could drag it back to your Kindle as a form of protest, every single day.
What Amazon HAS NOT DONE is reach into a kindle and delete non-purchased, non-DRMed material. It’s DRMed as a functionality of being sold by Amazon- if amazon chooses to start selling non DRMd books, those files would reside in the cloud as well, and would suffer from the same fate, if deleted.

I feel like I’m astroturfing for the Kindle, I keep sticking up for it. I genuinely think that it’s a misunderstood device. People that complain about the DRMness of the kindle obviously haven’t loaded a kindle up with gigs of non-drmed files (both reflow-ed PDFs (via amazon’s free service, amazon’s .10/document wireless service, or by yourself with mobipocket).
People that say that the iPhone or Palm or Netbooks offer a perfectly legitimate reading source haven’t spent much time with e-paper.

So my main takeaway: It’s my belief that Amazon deleted 1984 from their servers, they didn’t reach out and press a kill switch on everybody’s kindle. The side effect of the Whispernet (which is a nice feature) had bad consequences.

This doesn’t mean that the Kindle is a worthless pile of junk. Kindles don’t delete books, people delete books. Or something.
Anonymous

One of the nine products Jeff Bezos has reviewed is Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2QNLVM0O22JMI/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Weird.
styrofoam

Right- all the earlier stories made a big fuss over how the publisher changed it’s mind. that’s all I ever heard about, and I thought it was totally jacked up.

The initial facts were initially wrong, but nobody’s going out of their wey to correct themselves.

Granted, it’s still a debacle of PR. But the actions now at least follow some sort of morbid logical path. Before it was horrific. Now it’s just keystone kops.
coop

@8 Hey Church,

I’m with Rindan on readng book formatted PDFs on an iPhone. Yes, it works, yes, it sux, yes, I have an iPhone.

coop
Anonymous

This is the first I’ve seen that the ebooks were ‘illegally sold’. I’d always heard that the publisher just changed its mind about selling them.
Sceadugenga

The marketdroid vapidity of “going forward” really jars me, especially after the gritty realism of “stupid”. If this apology were in a film noir, there would be a swinging lightbulb and “stupid” would be said with the light shining on Bezos’s face, highlighting his sincere regret over this, but the shadows would creep in as the bulb swung away and his corporate side finished the job.
sabik

@styrofoam #25: yes, we know. Amazon designed it to happen that way.

That’s why everyone is saying it’s an architectural problem: the architecture of how Amazon “sells” the ebooks is at fault. They’ve set it up, probably unthinkingly, so that this kind of thing can happen. Now it has happened. They’re justly copping flak for setting it up to happen.

This particular decision may have been “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line” but it was also inevitable given the way they’ve set up their system.
sopekmir

While it is good to see an apology from Jeff, it is certainly not enough for me to stop thinking about Amazon’s policies to be Big Brother of some part of eBook market.

Only when, as Clay wrote, they cede the technical ability to do so, or change their DRM philosophy, I could regain trust in them.
Todd Sieling

Apology, sure, but how do we know he won’t just take it back? :)

Honestly, I was never leaning even close to a Kindle with it’s god-awful ugmo design and 1970 display (hellos, color?), but this really pushes me far far away, likely never to return.

@Rindan: I would buy Amazon’s brand of evil over Apple’s any day of the week. Amazon actually does have some history of openness.

I’m not sure what history of openness that Amazon has had other than providing an API, but Apple has never pretended to have any, and certainly doesn’t handle these kinds of things with the ham-handedness we’ve seen from Amazon. The incident that precipitated AmazonFail was so poorly managed that the entire PR dept should have been swept out, but instead we get a middling explanation and then follow up with disappearing books.

We can talk all we want, but sales or lack of them will tell the future story of the Kindle, and it will be interesting to see if this mess glues itself to the Kindle brand or falls away in the memory hole of consumers.
reginald

Or you can just download for free here
Alessandro Cima

My response to clever little Mr. Bezos is to stick a pin in his eye. Apology not accepted.

I love Orwell and I love ’1984′ except for that last bit about the history of the language. Should be deleted. But I think Bezos is a dip who doesn’t read.

Amazon’s habit is to kick the crap out of people and censor what they want to censor, then make a feeble apology and promise it won’t happen again. But gosh they just seem to do something nasty every three weeks or so.

Bloggers should not be linking to Amazon product pages. It takes a little effort, but the links can be stripped out. I’m doing it. It’s fun. There’s no money in that nonsense anyway. Anyone who says they’re making money selling Amazon stuff is lying.
Secret_Life_of_Plants

It still freaked me out. I will never buy a kindle. I can convert any book in the world to a PDF with a copier and read it on my iphone.
phisrow

This is the part where he announces that the last thing Amazon will ever remotely delete is their ability to remotely delete stuff.

Oh wait, no, he just said some nice stuff because people were angry and that makes bad PR. Carry on.
Rindan

This won’t make me pick up a Kindle any time soon. Books are just too damn cheap and I like the fact that if I drop it or leave it somewhere I am only out $8.

That said, that is as sincere sounding of a self abasing apology from a corporation as I have ever heard. They don’t even try and wiggle around or give excuses about the fact that the fucked it up hardcore. Clearly actions speak louder than words, put those are some pretty nice words.

While Kindle is not my cup of tea, I have always personally liked Amazon.
Tdawwg

Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.

Bezos later added, “You can tell I’m serious by my use of scare quotes! That is to say, I ‘fully accept’ my ‘responsibility’ for the ‘mistakes that were made.’ “
Clay

This is a fine first step, and it’s very reassuring to see Bezos speaking so plainly on the issue.

The next step is going to be trickier, though — to truly address this problem, to bring it in line with the principles the CEO speaks of, will require modifying the architecture of the Kindle experience. Amazon should not merely make it a policy not to delete books remotely, it should cede the technical ability to do so.

I don’t know how the Kindle’s embedded OS works. But it needs to have purchased books reside in a private userspace for which the purchasing processes simply do not have full r/w permissions. The user’s library should be a drop box, just like the mailbox to which their Super-Saver-shipped paper books are delivered.

Only when this technical problem is solved will the Kindle be safe for readers. Of course, there is still the issue of DRM, but that’s another discussion entirely.
Anonymous

Oh, he said he’s sorry? then everything’s OK.
Wait, I didn’t see him saying anything about, you know, what’s Amazon’s gonna do the next time something like this happens. My guess? do the exact same thing, then apologize again.
AirPillo

This is still pretty shocking even if it isn’t sincere. CEO’s do not normally say that their company did something “stupid”. Public admission of making significant mistakes is something almost completely foreign to western corporate culture. Public admission of mistakes that frankly admit they were bone-headed mistakes is just downright bizarre.

Though honestly, I do think they would readily do this again anyway. They will be more vigilant from now on to avoid accidentally releasing material without the appropriate permissions… but if they ever do, they will probably delete it from devices again. They have to. It’s likely the least expensive way to appease rights-holders and avoid litigation.
Rindan

I can convert any book in the world to a PDF with a copier and read it on my iphone.

There are two hilarious things in that one sentence.

First is that you claim you are going to convert books into PDF files. I have had to photo copy a few pages of a book before, and I am pretty sure my limit is about 10 pages before I get bored. There is also the hilarious image of someone trying to ready a full sized PDF that isn’t formatted for viewing on a tiny iPhone screen to giggle over.

Second, you declare that the solution is the open sourced, DRM free, censorship free, ENTIRELY OPEN PLATFORM of the iPhone. Lolz. This is kind of like a sheep saying that it doesn’t trust raccoons, so it is going to live in a den of wolves.

I’m not a Kindle fan, but I would buy Amazon’s brand of evil over Apple’s any day of the week. Amazon actually does have some history of openness.
JB NicholsonOwens

A better way to make “any book you ever buy will always be downloadable again” work is to sell people copies of DRM-free book files. People could manage their own files and be free to sell them to others without going through Amazon as a controller/tracker of all exchanges.

Magnatune.com does business in exactly this way. If you buy tracks from them and give them an email address, you can request re-downloads of any purchased track. You don’t have to give them an email address if you don’t want to. If you do, they’ll probably send you the download URL or some kind of confirmation to the email address you gave them. No limited Apple-style N-times re-downloads of lost tracks, no DRM involved at all, and you can listen to the tracks on any device that will play them. I play their FLAC files on my completely free software OS. On top of all that, half of the money per track goes to the artist; a far better deal than most musicians get with big business record deals.
Church

@7 Rindan

“I have had to photo copy a few pages of a book before, and I am pretty sure my limit is about 10 pages before I get bored. ”

Fortunately there is an army of more attentive people out there who have likely already done it.

“There is also the hilarious image of someone trying to ready a full sized PDF that isn’t formatted for viewing on a tiny iPhone screen to giggle over.”

Have you even used an iPhone?
pishabh

Nostradamus predicted this
styrofoam

Amazon lets you download the book.
You can move it from your Kindle to your PC.
You can have it emailed to your account.

You still run the rick of losing it in a file deletion, computer crash, whatever. Theoretically, storing it in the cloud is a nice way to always get it.

Even if it was DRM free and they had deleted it from the cloud, the same thing would have happened, because it technically disappeared from your library. it didn’t delete on your kindle itself.

So keep copies of the these files on your PC, and you’re good.
Johnny Cat

It would be so much cooler if he used to scar tissue to re-animate the corpse of George Orwell, then let it throttle him. On live TV.
Anonymous

I’m glad they apologized but I’ve decided against ever considering a dedicated reader like this. I don’t want anyone to have the possibility of doing such a thing. Promises in 2009 just may mean nothing in 2015, 2022 or whatever.

As far as I’m concerned, this episode just killed the Kindle.
Permanent4

I don’t see that rat bastard apologizing for cutting me off from Amazon Associates just because I live in North Carolina.
Anonymous

Talk is cheap.
Clumpy

What could they possibly do to remedy this situation? They’ve given themselves the ability to zap purchases so they HAVE to use it if copyright holders demand it and make enough of a stink. Thus the Kindle is inherently flawed and no amount of good intentions or remorse on Amazon’s part will change the fact that if this sort of thing CAN happen, it WILL.
Tynam

While agreeing with Clumpy, I have to admit that this is the best corporate apology I’ve read in a long time. When was the last time you heard any exec or senior manager (or politician or investor for that matter) just admit the company had done something stupid and say sorry?
Blue

Until ‘closing the backdoor Amazon has into your Kindle’ is what “going forward” means, these are just empty words.

An action is needed; deleting the rootkit to your files and ceding control is the only meaningful way Amazon can begin to repair the damage done.
wolfiesma

Amazon is very open to input. Every now and then, between the flashing images of famous authors, the Kindle screensaver asks you to share your thoughts on your experience with their product . Actively seeking customer input is a great thing, and definitely gives the impression of a somewhat progressive, forward thinking organization.

I realize this is a corporation, and as such, they have to enter into various business dealings with various entities, some of which put them in compromising situations. Still, as corporations go, booksellers, even behemouths like Amazon, are a fairly benign force in the universe.

That Massey Energy, on the other hand…
sirdook

I’m with Clumpy, et al. What would “walking the walk” even mean here? The apology is too generic – what specifically do they regret, what are the principles and “mission” that they violated, and how will “better decisions” change the fact that they’ve designed these devices so that the decisions is theirs and not the owner’s?
Jewels Vern

Sincerity is the main thing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Anonymous

Ok, so here’s what Amazon needs to do: arrange for a friendly party to sue them, and make sure the suit wins. Then they can shrug their shoulders at publishers, avoid future liability, and please opportunistic customers at the same time.

“Sorry, we’re just the Post Office”

But maybe not yet.
phisrow

@SIRDOOK, #16: Given that Amazon has super (formerly) secret remote nuking powers, they could “walk the walk” by remotely nuking their super secret remote nuking powers. Doing anything less would demonstrate insincerity.
Antinous / Moderator

Hey, it’s a very nice, groveling apology. CEOs should grovel more. It’s becoming increasingly rare.

Contrast with the hospital in the UK that killed a baby with a saline overdose last week and issued the following apology: “We apologise for any shortcomings in our care of their child.”
JB NicholsonOwens

Only when this technical problem is solved will the Kindle be safe for readers. Of course, there is still the issue of DRM, but that’s another discussion entirely.

No, digital restrictions management is the heart of this discussion. Without DRM, Amazon would have had no way to delete people’s purchases from their Swindles. DRM is the name for the technical power Amazon holds over their customers. For all we know Amazon’s power goes further than deleting purchased ebooks. Maybe it allows modification of ebooks, so what you thought you purchased changes later on to match Amazon’s editorial desires. With proprietary software you can never be sure of the full of the proprietor’s power.

A fully free software ebook reader is the only way to be sure that your texts remain your own. The only way to solve this is to have complete source code for all of the device’s software under free software license(s). Any scheme that doesn’t involve complete software freedom is nothing more than a technocratic shuffling of the deck chairs.