In 2009, Amazon.com took away copies of purchased electronic books sold through Amazon’s “Kindle” book service. Amazon.com’s embarrassment at being caught was widely disseminated in the mainstream press and Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon, wrote apologetically about the incident.
In December 2010, Selena Kitt, erotic fiction author, told us Amazon did it again:
On December 9, 2010, I was contacted by CreateSpace (Amazon’s Print on Demand service) who publishes my print books. They informed me that my title, Back to the Garden, had been removed for violating their “content guidelines.” When I consulted their guidelines I found them so vague as to be useless””were they saying my content was illegal? Public domain? Stolen? Offensive? (All of these were on the list). When I inquired as to the specifics of the violation, they were not forthcoming, and sent a form letter response stating that Amazon “may, in its sole discretion, at any time, refuse to list or distribute any content that it deems inappropriate.”
On Sunday, December 12, the print title that had been removed had now disappeared from the Kindle store, as well as two of my other titles, Naughty Bits and Under Mr. Nolan’s Bed. I have over fifty titles selling on Amazon, all of them in erotic fiction categories. The only thing these three singled-out titles had in common, besides being written by me””they were all erotic incest fantasy fiction.
(I didn’t link Kitt’s book titles to Barnes & Noble as Kitt did because Barnes & Noble sells another proprietary-driven eBook reader called the “Nook”. Since the Nook runs proprietary software, it too can be controlled by someone other than the owner. Therefore switching from Amazon’s proprietary device to Barnes & Noble’s proprietary device is merely jumping between masters. What’s called for is switching to freedom, even if that means doing without an eBook reader.)
Kitt says other erotic fiction authors experienced the same thing she did. But Amazon hadn’t just taken the eBooks from their virtual shelves; that would be merely unfortunate for the authors looking to sell copies of their texts. Amazon had removed the copies already sold to Kindle customers…again!
When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives. When one reader called to get a refund for the book she no longer had access to, she was chastised by the Amazon customer service representative about the “severity” of the book she’d chosen to purchase.
So, how much is it worth to you to have the freedom to read what you want, retain full control of whatever reading device you own where only you decide what is on that device, and retain what you get even if your reading choices no longer comport with a businesses idea of appropriateness? You wouldn’t let someone take books off of your bookshelf, why let publishers or vendors remove eBooks from your reading device?
This is not really about Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Swindle and Nook reading devices; sure, this unquestionably justifies not doing business with proprietary software vendors including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. DRM stories are primarily about your freedom. Every DRM story is really about why you should value your freedoms to read, copy, build upon, and retain works.