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

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.

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.

Weird.

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.

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

coop

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.’ “

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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