When Is a Book Not a Book

In what could be described as a beautiful Machiavellian plot by the small independent and used bookstore cabal, Amazon Kindle owners awoke Friday to find books had gone missing, not only from the store 'shelves' but from their own devices that had been bought and paid for.

Welcome to the world of digital technology and the need to back up your own files because there is nobody looking out for you on the retailer side. Apple has hinted that they may charge you for re-downloading iPhone apps from them, everyone has seen the iTunes warning that 'digital files are valuable and should be backed up, but now Amazon has taken it one step further and deleted your purchases. To be fair I hear they did credit your account for the missing files.

The beautiful irony? The books that are now un-books? George Orwell's (albeit unauthorized American editions) of Animal Farm and 1984.

The word from Amazon Customer Service:

"The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store."

Apparently while a contract is only worth as much as the paper it is written on, digital files are but a soap bubble subject to the whims of the publisher and they who control the transmition.

The hand that rocks the Kindle

Is the hand that rules the world.