Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com
I’ve wanted a Kindle for a while now, but after this I’m not so sure.
But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.
This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.
That fact that the books were ‘1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’ does add a hilarious ironic twist to it all.
via Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others – Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com.
