1984...meet DRM. Source: jbonnain on Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0.

The New York Times reports that Amazon is offering free-of-charge replacement copies of the deleted George Orwell e-books Animal Farm and 1984. Those who do not wish to replace their e-books may get $30 or an Amazon gift certificate instead.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers.

Amazon said in an e-mail message to those customers that if they chose to have their digital copies restored, they would be able to see any digital annotations they had made. Those who do not want the books are eligible for an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30, the company said.

The message included Mr. Bezos’s mea culpa from July. “This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of ‘1984’ and other novels on Kindle,” Mr. Bezos said. He went on to describe Amazon’s actions as “stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.”

It’s good to see Amazon admitting that they made a huge mistake here, and I applaud them for not making up excuses instead. Still, this highlights a huge problem with DRM’d e-books and e-book readers like the Kindle. Whether Amazon will pull a similar stunt in the future is uncertain, although the backlash from this makes it unlikely. However, it is important to remember that this could still be used for more nefarious purposes, such as oppressive governments coaxing Amazon into removing e-books that the government considers a threat to their well-being.

• The New York Times (cookies required)
• Slashdot

"Big Brother....is Watching YOU!" by Chaotic Good01 on Flickr (CC-BY)

David Pogue reports on his blog that Amazon has secretly pulled electronic copies of 1984 and Animal Farm purchased on its Kindle service:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

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.

According to Amazon, the person who let Amazon sell the copies of the books in question didn’t have the rights to them:

“These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

It’s understandable for Amazon to be confused as to who holds what rights on these books; most of Orwell’s books are in the public domain in some countries — Australia is one example — but not, for instance, in the US or the UK. Even so, this incident only makes plain, for those who didn’t already know, the pitfalls of investing in closed systems like the Kindle Store and iTunes; there, not only do you have no rights to what you have purchased, but you may have no choice to unpurchase something, should they deem it necessary or desirable.

• New York Times blog entry
• CNet reporting on statement from Amazon

The MobileRead forums have been sent a DMCA takedown notice for linking to a Python script that allows Kindle owners to purchase e-books on their Kindles from stores other than Amazon’s own store.

As some of you may already know, this week we received a DMCA take-down notice from Amazon requesting the removal of the tool kindlepid.py and instructions associated with it. Although we never hosted this tool (contrary to their claim), nor believe that this tool is used to remove technological measures (contrary to their claim), we decided, due to the vagueness of the DMCA law and our intention to remain in good relation with Amazon, to voluntarily follow their request and remove links and detailed instructions related to it.

A quick backgrounder: kindlepid.py is a small Python script allowing you to derive a Mobipocket-compatible personal identifier (PID) for your Kindle reader. This PID in itself has nothing at all to do with reading any copyrighted content. It is only used to make legitimate e-book purchases at stores other than Amazon’s.

We believe in the freedom of speech and we encourage you to continue expressing your views and thoughts on tools like kindlepid.py. We only ask you not to provide any how-to instructions, source codes and/or links for obtaining kindlepid.py.

I have to wonder if Amazon suffers from being so big that its departments don’t talk with each other. How can their music division get the concept correctly while the e-book division can mess it up so badly? Make no mistake, Amazon’s Kindle Store is the iTunes Store of e-books, and Amazon is just as overzealous and controlling as Apple when it comes to their products, even after the point of purchase. Indeed, Amazon is worse: at least you can play MP3s on an iPod. Try reading a PDF on your Kindle without paying your “reading right” to Amazon first.

• MobileRead forums
• Slashdot

The New York Times’ Bits Blog reports that Amazon is going to allow publishers to disable the controversial text-to-speech function on the Kindle.

Amazon announced today that it will let publishers decide whether they want the new Kindle e-book device to read their books aloud.

Amazon maintains that the feature is legal and that it would in fact increase the market for audio books.

But it said, “We strongly believe many rights holders will be more comfortable with the text-to-speech feature if they are in the driver’s seat.”

If Amazon is so confident that the feature is legal, then why bend over for the interests of book publishers? Why not contest them, challenging them to test their theory of an “audio right” in court? Are there other e-book stores that Amazon is afraid the publishers will sell at instead? I certainly don’t know of any.

• NYTimes.com Bits Blog [Print version]
• Slashdot

Ghosts - Credit: ghosts.nin.com

Nine Inch Nail’s CC licensed Ghosts has been named the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

Soon, a free album might acheive this as well.

• Creative Commons
• Amazon

Amazon has pulled (and restored) the Spore reviews on Amazon.

Pulling customer reviews is not a terribly common act on the part of Amazon. Aside from yanking religiously motivated rants on certain religious texts and various fake reviews by people impersonating celebrities and so forth, Amazon has typically been very liberal about allowing its users to express their honest opinions about the site’s products.

The Amazon product page for Spore shows no reviews, just left over negative tags for the game

Strangely, only the reviews on the main Spore retail release have disappeared. Negative, DRM-related reviews for other editions of the game, such as the “Galactic Edition,” remain posted. But the main product remains conspicuously bare of customer opinion, with the only traces of protest left being the remaining tags associated with the product by customers which include the likes of “drm,” “limited activations,” and “securom.”

…

An Amazon spokesperson says that the reviews disappeared due to a “glitch” in the system. “The team is working to resolve this issue now and have all the reviews back up on the site,” the spokesperson told Ars. “Amazon doesn’t censor or edit customer reviews based [on their content] and we’d only remove a review if it fell outside our guidelines.” The thousands of negative reviews are slowly coming back online.

Glitch?  Maybe.

• Ars Technica
• The Consumerist

Spore has received a 2-star rating on Amazon from user reviews, due to its unpopular and aggressive DRM.

Spore, the long awaited evolved version of Sim City by game genius Will Wright has a DRM problem. As of this post, there are 14 “1 Star” reviews versus six 4 and 5 star reviews, by people who said that they won’t buy it (which admittedly isn’t quite the same as a review of the game itself) because it has DRM:

Thus Spore now has an average of 2-stars on Amazon. The game as gotten good but not excellent reviews, so this is surely of concern for the makers as people will probably take the Amazon rating seriously and might not buy.

I doubt it will affect the market that much, but I like seeing this kind of thing.

• Fred Benenson’s Blog
• Boing Boing
• Amazon

Amazon will run an OLPC give one, get one program in November.  This is about the same time this program opened up last year, but this time it will be with Amazon’s help.

Back in May it was announced that the Give 1 Get 1 program would be making a comeback and in June there were indications that it would happen after September 1.

Amazon will run with G1G1

Now IDG News Service broke the news earlier today that Amazon will be running this year’s Give 1 Get 1 program from late November until possibly the end of December. This information is based on an interview with OLPC’s Matt Keller who works as OLPC’s director of Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The brief news release indicates that Give 1 Get 1 will be limited to the United States. Since there had been rumours to also bring the 2008 edition of G1G1 to other places such as Europe this piece of information, if indeed true, will be quite a disappointment for many of us. Especially since a partner such as Amazon would probably be in a very good position to make G1G1 a global program.

I will still not be buying one .

• OLPC News