A publisher submitted 1984 and Animal farm for publishing as Kindle ebooks. When it was pointed out to Amazon that the publisher did not have the rights to either work. Amazon pulled them from the site and from all the Kindles that had downloaded them. I believe they refunded the money people had paid.
Thanks. At least they had the sense to refund the money on that occasion, then. If they're going to start pulling books 'out of service' they need a much better reason that 'we suddenly don't like the content even though we accepted it for publication'.
They seem to be adept at shooting themselves in the foot.
If I remember correctly people affected got their choice of three free books of their choice or a legal copy of 1984 and two free books of their choice. Amazon really tried to make things okay.
I'm very surprised they did anything like this, given the furball that 1984 was for them--at least this time they didn't delete stuff off people's readers--but I'm surprised they deleted stuff from people's archives either; I would have thought they had learned better.
As a Kindle owner myself, I will be contacting Amazon about this. I am not interested in incest erotica, but it's the principle of the thing.
Oh, it wasn't an objection - at least not by Amazon. It was pointed out to them that it was still in copyright and they didn't have the rights. They pulled the e-book, obviously, but they also pulled it back from everyone who'd bought it, without compensation.
Actually, they did, as Robert says above, compensate. My error. What they did then was to pull the book from the actual machines - until then, no-one had realised they could do that. They promised not to do it again, but plainly that does not include books archived on their Cloud.
Ah, now you mention that part of it, I do vaguely remember the kerfuffle. They need to sort out and state in very plain language what their terms of service actually are, then stick to them.
Yesterday I bought something from 'appliances on line' - as usual I clicked on their 'Terms and Conditions' expecting the usual bumph - and was pleasantly surprised by their very plain English terms - if they can do it (though I will wait until we get the goods before I comment further) I don't see why other companies can't.
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They seem to be adept at shooting themselves in the foot.
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I'm very surprised they did anything like this, given the furball that 1984 was for them--at least this time they didn't delete stuff off people's readers--but I'm surprised they deleted stuff from people's archives either; I would have thought they had learned better.
As a Kindle owner myself, I will be contacting Amazon about this. I am not interested in incest erotica, but it's the principle of the thing.
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The terms of service are several pages of legalese. I did try to read them once.
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