数字出版在线

亚马逊周五从kindle书店和用户设备中删除了两本书：乔治·奥威尔(George Orwell)的小说《1984》和《动物庄园》。

　　在《1984》中，政府审查人员会抹去所有对“老大哥”不利的文字内容，将这些内容通通送进一个被叫做“记忆洞”的管道焚毁。亚马逊周五似乎将《1984》中这一幕变成了现实。

　　该公司通过远程同步，从一些已经购买这两本书电子版的读者的电子阅读器Kindle中删除了这两本书；此举激怒了读者，并在网上引发了争议。

　　亚马逊坦承，删除书籍是个糟糕的主意。亨德内说，“亚马逊正在调整系统，因此如果未来再遇到这种情况，我们就不会从用户设备中删除书籍了。”

　　那些电子书籍被删的用户表示，这些书是数字出版社MobileReference出售的。MobileReference是SoundTells旗下子公司，SoundTells暂时没有对此发表评论。

　　用户购买的电子书籍是通过无线网络传送至Kindle上的。亚马逊还用这一网络，对设备之间进行电子书同步——同时也可以让书籍消失。

　　周五晚间在Kindle书店仍可以找到《1984》一书的授权电子版，这是由该书的美国出版社Houghton Mifflin Harcourt发售的。但《动物庄园》的电子版已经下架。

　　在承认此事具讽刺意味的同时，那些购买了被删书籍的读者作出了愤怒回应。费城一家活页乐谱零售商的管理人士查尔斯·斯拉特(Charles Slater)说：“在所有书籍召回中，我从来没有想到亚马逊居然真的有权或是有能力删除我已经购买的东西”。他上个月以99美分的价格购买了《1984》的电子版。

　　硅谷工程师安托万·布吕吉(Antoine Bruguier)表示，他此前就发现自己购买的《1984》电子版似乎是扫描纸质书籍的。

　　亚马逊似乎近期还从Kindle中删除了其他已购买电子书。用户在网站论坛上表示，《哈利·波特》丛书和艾茵·兰德(Ayn Rand)小说的电子版也消失了。

　　亚马逊公布的关于Kindle的服务协议似乎并没有授权该公司删除用户已经购买的书籍。服务协议规定，亚马逊授权用户保存“应用电子内容的永久版本”。

　　无论商品是否非法售卖，现实产品的零售商当然不会闯进顾客家中强行收购顾客已经购买的商品。但亚马逊似乎却对发售的Kindle电子内容享有着这种独特的权力。

　　英国电信首席安全技术官布鲁斯·施奈尔(Bruce Schneier)表示，“这显示当你从亚马逊购买电子书的时候，你所拥有的权利少的可怜。”他说，“作为一个Kindle用户，我很失望。我不能把书借给别人，也不能转手出售我读过的书，现在的情况是我甚至都不知道我的书明天是不是还在。”

　　对17岁的底特律学生贾斯汀·格劳斯基(Justin Gawronski)来说，《1984》是他的暑假作业，当亚马逊删除这本书的时候，他在书上作的笔记和注释也随之消失了。格劳斯基说：“他们并不仅仅是删除一本书，他们偷走了我的作业”。

　　当然，在网上是不存在记忆洞这样的东西。尽管《1984》的美国版权要到2044年才到期，但这本书已经在加拿大、澳大利亚和俄罗斯失去了版权保护。这些国家的一些网站向所有人免费提供这本书的电子版本。(逸飞)新浪科技讯北京时间7月18日下午消息

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

Times Topics: Kindle

Gadgetwise Blog: Amazon Offers Free Replacements for Cracked Kindles Post a Comment on Pogue’s Posts

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.

Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.

An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”

People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”

Antoine Bruguier, an engineer in Silicon Valley, said he had noticed that his digital copy of “1984” appeared to be a scan of a paper edition of the book. “If this Kindle breaks, I won’t buy a new one, that’s for sure,” he said.

Amazon appears to have deleted other purchased e-books from Kindles recently. Customers commenting on Web forums reported the disappearance of digital editions of the Harry Potter books and the novels of Ayn Rand over similar issues.

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.”

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

“It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon,” said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. “As a Kindle owner, I’m frustrated. I can’t lend people books and I can’t sell books that I’ve already read, and now it turns out that I can’t even count on still having my books tomorrow.”

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer 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.

On the Internet, of course, there is no such thing as a memory hole. While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.

标签：Orwell book, Kindle