gf-tech.com

An update on the Kindle book deleting scandal that I wrote about previously. The eBooks were being sold through Amazon were not authorized versions, and the owner of the copyright requested Amazon to stop. Amazon could have simply stopped selling new copies, but they went a step further and deleted already purchased copies from everyone's Kindles.

Apparently the Terms of Service on the Kindle don't mention Amamazon can/will do this. From the New York Times article

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Not so much eh? I never considered buying a Kindle due to the DRM scheme involved. Now I definitely won't. There are lots of other eBook readers out there that don't have any DRM that I will consider buying. There are also more and more places to buy PDF's instead of dead tree tomes. Sometime (soon I hope) there will be a tipping point and book shelves will become more and more bare as society turns to digital books.

There is a news story popping up all over the place today. Apparently a published asked Amazon to stop selling the electronic version of a certain author's books.

Amazon agreed and then

It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

Yikes. This is yet another example of why DRM is horrible, and bad. You can read more here.

Another huge strike against the Kindle for me.