Questing for Atlantis

I may be one of the only people not particularly bothered, specifically, by Amazon’s deleting of 1984 and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles, and, more generally, Amazon’s DRM approach to the e-books it sells.

On both counts, it comes down to a simple point: No one forces anyone to buy a Kindle or Amazon e-books. If DRM is really that much of a problem, stop buying. There’s plenty of sources for open e-books out there, and, I know it’s shocking, but there’s this crazy thing that got invented – it’s made out of a bunch of sheets of paper, with words printed on them in ink, all bound up together inside a cover made of stiffer and usually thicker paper – they call it a book and it’s a completely open format.

As for the more specific case, yeah it sucks that people got their stuff deleted, especially the kid who had the study notes. But the simply fact is the people who listed it had no right to do so. Likewise, you have no right to buy stolen goods. Normally these issues are thorny since it’s hard to properly get people who unwittingly buy stolen goods their money back. In this case it wasn’t, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.

All the same, I would certainly enjoy Amazon making their system and products more open. So I’ll be intrigued to see how Sony’s decision to use an open format for their e-book sales influences Amazon.