The ownership debacle

Amazon's Fahrenheit 451 debacle has really turned me off from posting.

Remember, I am generally supportive of Amazon and the Kindle, I'm just one of the self selected critics who has decided he has the chops to snipe from the margins.

Amazon's Fahrenheit 451 actions are a failure on a whole different level.

The skimmed down basics are:
*Someone who didn't own the copyright submitted a digital copy of the book to Amazon.
*The true copyright owners contacted Amazon and had the unauthorized version removed.
*Amazon deleted the unauthorized copies from all Kindles, and returned the customer's money.

Ironies about deleting Fahrenheit 451 aside this exposes just how different digital books are from real books. Namely: you can't own digital books. This has always been obvious to some extent since you can't resell your kindle books, but not being able to keep the books you've bought is something else entirely.

If this had played out with physical books Amazon would have stopped selling the unauthorized version and the copyright owners would have sued the unauthorized publisher. Any suggestion that Amazon would turn over its customer list so that the copyright holder could contact and confiscate the copies that were already sold would have been laughed at. If the publisher did try and go to this extreme step they would have had to take Amazon to court, followed by suing each and every customer to compel them to turn over their copies.

It would never happen.

But it can happen in digital land.

Do we get the same benefits in reverse? When a publisher issues corrections to a book, will Amazon correct the kindle versions? If a revised edition comes out, there's no reason we can't have the corrections.

Now that Amazon is setting itself up as the guardian of book correctness, I think we have the right to demand that they provide us with the positive as well as the negative.