Yeah, actual books do not disappear into the digital night: “This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned…” Here.
Think about this: I understand the Amazon digital retraction was a matter of the original seller not having legal authority to have the book digitized. OK, but what if for example, in the future a downloaded book to the Kindle was considered not sufficiently PC enough, say it had some passages that Muslims or Christians objected to or passages that were considered racial or too conspiracy oriented, would Amazon then be able to take out the offending words? As much as I love electronic gadgets like the Kindle for now I’ll stick with paper.
Note: Here’s a good article on the subject of digital deletion:Why 2024 will be like 1984 (“…The worst thing about this story isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That’s an awesome power, and Amazon’s justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1′s and 0′s, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections…”)
