I am grateful to the always excellent Tallbloke who normally confines his interest to climate affairs but who picked up this story which has sinister potential. Apparently, Amazon have quietly "disappeared" all e-copies of George Orwell's books, 1984 and Animal Farm, not just from their own list of e-books on offer but from the individual Kindles of their customers!
It all stemmed from a dispute over copywright but the fact that Amazon did this without a word to the public, let alone their customers, provides an indication of just how fragile security of property is in this brave, new, electronic age. Tallbloke sums it up, thus:
Regardless of whether you believe Amazon’s promise to leave your Kindle alone,
the company has tipped its hand and shown us the dark side of a culture where
books are only available in electronic form. If the WhisperNet service from
Kindle allows the company to delete books silently from your device, what other
information might they have access to? Can the company monitor what you’re
reading and when – and then hand that over to law enforcement? Can it replace a
book file with a different file whose content is changed?
No wonder George has a wry smile on his face!
