When the news cycles are being driven by celebrity deaths (Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Frank McCourt), political sex scandals (John Ensign, Mark Sanford), healthcare reform, phony scandals about whether or not President Obama is staring at a woman's ass (Note that Sarkozy didn't get any trouble over it, even though he was totally blatant--I guess people expect that of a French guy who divorced his first wife and married a model?), and all the other things that our eagle-eyed news folks cover, it was kind of lost.  But it bothered me.

In brief, the story is this:

Users of Amazon.com's e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including "1984" and "Animal Farm," had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded. 

While I could rant about the copyright issues, I'm not going to.  As someone who writes for a living, I believe in some kind of copyrights.  Creators of material need to be compensated for their work, and a 20 years (or whatever it is) copyright doesn't strike me as out of whack.  However, I do think it's absurd to allow copyright renewal of a book by anybody some six decades after the author thereof has joined the Choir Invisible.  At this stage, who is making money off the book?  A publishing house, probably.  I don't think they deserve to profit any further from this author's works.

But I'm not going to talk about that (frankly, it's a whole 'nother post).

No, what bothers me are two things.  First, that Amazon can do this with impunity (and have it go barely noticed!).   Amazon doesn't need to give notice?  Amazon has the legal right to remove things from my private device at any time?  And why isn't anyone commenting on this particular aspect of the Kindle software? Isn't anyone bothered by the fact that Amazon has a backdoor into your Kindle or (worse, in my view) your iPhone?  If they can remove books, is there anything else they can do via their backdoor?  Or what could hackers do with this knowledge?  To say this is nervous-making is to understate it considerably.

I would like to add that this is one of the many, many reasons I prefer the eReader software to the Kindle software.  Aside from this egregious backdoor, in eReader you can adjust the justification, the screen background, the font type, and many other things; you can search on text, make notes, and highlight in eReader, but not in Kindle; you can link to a dictionary in eReader, and can then highlight and find the definition of words, but you can't in the Kindle.  And best of all, in my view:  when you download a book to your eReader on your iPhone, it's on your iPhone.   I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that eReader doesn't have any backdoor to allow them to delete stuff from the iPhones of individuals.

I'm not trying to sell folks on the eReader software here; I'm just doing a compare and contrast.  After all, Barnes and Noble can't just come into my house, rifle through my bookshelves, and take away whatever they feel is a "copyright infringement"; why should Amazon be able to do that with my iPhone?  

The second issue is related to copyright, avarice, and Amazon.  After reading this article, I went online to see if Amazon has 1984 in Kindle format.  They do . . . for $9.99 (which they exitedly note is marked down from $14.95--a new hardcover-level price!).   So they pull folks' copies without warning, give them a refund, and then demand a sawbuck for a book that came out 61 years ago by an author 6 decades dead. This is an electronic copy of an old book; why are we being forced to pay nearly hardcover prices for this book?  (You can get Neal Stephenson's brand new novel, "Anathem", in trade paperback format on Amazon for $6.99, for example.)  Other than profit to Amazon and whoever owns the copyright--certainly not Orwell!--there is no reason, I'm guessing.

I'm not even going into the extreme level of irony involved that it is 1984, of all books, that were made "unbooks" on people's Kindles.  The term "Orwellian" is thrown around far too much these days, but if this isn't a classic case, I don't know what is.  (What next:  Apple taking seriptitious snapshots of us through the 3 megapixel camera and sending them to the FBI?  Yeesh.)

So all you Kindle users:  beware.  Really.  Your books aren't yours; they are Amazon's.  And they can yank them back whenever they durn well please.