As has been widely, widely reported, Amazon remotely deleted copies of books by George Orwell from their customers’ Kindles last week after a rights issue with the publisher MobileReference.
Even if it was not actually a huge surprise that Amazon had the ability to claw back e-books it had sold (or — to be honest — that someone might publish something that didn’t belong to them on the Kindle), there has been a predictably hysterical reaction, fuelled — at least in part — by antipathy towards DRM and Amazon, and the delicious irony of the particular books involved.
Even Michael Bhaskar, who reignited the online DRM debate last week on The Digitalist by having the audacity to suggest that DRM might not be all bad (twice), is having second thoughts:
When I wrote the piece I was perhaps slightly self consciously swimming against the tide. However all that is made a mockery of when something like this happens – faith in the system is, well, annihilated and the issues of trust that came up are starkly thrown into relief.
Apparently the problem was a rights one and somewhere down the line the wrong books got into the system in the wrong way. Everyone was re-imbursed and the books are widely available. Does this make any difference to the body blow of seeing 1984 automatically deleted from people’s devices?
…Lets just say if this had come out last Monday, I don’t think the blog posts on DRM would have got written.
But — and perhaps I am alone on this — I don’t think this debacle is really about DRM. I actually think it is about a publisher not knowing (or not caring) that Orwell isn’t in the public domain in the Kindle’s primary market, and a vendor — who is unable (or unwilling) to thoroughly vet submissions — making an awful customer service decision and overreacting to rectify an awkward situation (which perhaps they felt they were partially responsible for).
Of course, as Cory Doctorow rightly points out, DRM is a the ‘loaded gun’ that allowed Amazon to kill the books. In the traditional book world this would not have been possible, and it really does bring home some the scariness of ‘remote deletion’. And yet this really came about not because of DRM (the issue could have been resolved without deleting the books) but because of poor judgement (by a publisher and the vendor) and, perhaps, as Paul Biba at Teleread suggests, because Amazon still does not fully understand what they’ve got themselves into.