During a conversation I had with Marc Glassman last week about the unfortunate closing of Pages, the issue of ebooks came up.
“How long before a Kindle clone becomes the next big thing?” he said of the quickly changing landscape of print. There’s bound to be some migration to ebooks, but an ironic twist over at Amazon today, adds to the stick-to-paper camp, and serves as another reminder of the degrees of electronic manipulation available to those who sell you on the permanence of digital information.
According to the New York Times a publisher backtracked from an electronic edition deal for, fittingly, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Amazon quickly obliged and remotely deleted the texts from people’s devices.
Forget that customers paid for their copies and were given a credit. The ease with which the move was made is deeply upsetting. Sure, that e-copy of 1984 didn’t have a well worn jacket or dog-eared pages for your favourite passages, but for those who have a personal link to their library, it must have felt like a heinous violation.
The Times post mentions Amazon saying these kind of situations are “rare”, but that’s not particularly reassuring.[rssbreak]
