The Computer Corner
By Charles Miller
Shady business

Just the other day I was walking down the street and spotted my friend Bill sitting in a sidewalk café reading his Kindle. What is Amazon Kindle? It is a little gadget about the size of a book that allows customers to purchase and download any kind of book from Amazon and begin reading right away.

It may also be programmed to automatically download many major newspapers.

The advantages of the Kindle are that it is easy to carry around and makes it possible for the users to have a library of 1,000 books, plus other reading material, wherever they want. It is an ideal appliance for those who travel by air or bus. The battery lasts for days and days, which sure beats the socks off my laptop. The Kindle is something I had thought about adding to my inventory of electronic gadgets until some news articles I read last month cooled my enthusiasm.

One of the thousands of books available from Amazon for download into the Kindle is George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. For the few who might not have read it, the novel describes a repressive, totalitarian regime in which the Thought Police control every aspect of people’s day-to-day lives.

What happened last month with Amazon and the Kindle was so spooky and so ironic, it made some people think they were living in Oceania. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of Amazon customers who bought and paid for their copy of George Orwell’s 1984 discovered it had been mysteriously and inexplicably erased from their Kindles.

The story from Amazon’s version of the “Ministry of Truth” is that certain digitized books, including Orwell’s 1984, were added to their inventory by a company that did not have the legal rights to them. When this was discovered, Amazon removed the illegal copies from their systems and then, without warning or apology, took back all the copies customers had already bought.

In the aftermath of this debacle, Amazon effectively acknowledged that reaching out as Big Brother and deleting downloads off of customers’ Kindles was a bad idea, even though customers were issued refunds. Angry Kindle users analogized this to storming into their home to burn a book that had been legally purchased, as in Farenheit 451. They pointed out that Amazon’s own terms of sale specifically grant customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.” Nowhere in the terms of sale does it say anything about Amazon having the right (or the ability) to delete downloaded books from the customer’s Kindle after they are purchased.

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old student, was reading 1984 on his Kindle for a school assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said. “The dog, er…Kindle, ate my homework.”

People were rightly upset to discover that Amazon could delete content off their Kindles without permission, but the bigger issue is why Amazon gave itself this capability. Computer software does not write itself spontaneously and Amazon purposely designed the Kindle with the ability to delete content remotely after the sale. For us consumers, it would be naive to assume that other content distribution methods for text, music and video do not have similar DRM-enforcement abilities hidden in them.

For the present, I think I will keep on buying books on paper and donating them to the Biblioteca when I finish reading them.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.