Jeff Bezos Regrets

Responding to a tsunami of ill will over Amazon’s deletion of two Kindle books, the company’s chief Jeff Bezos apologized, saying the handling of the matter was “stupid” and “thoughtless”. Bezos said that the harm done to Amazon’s image was “wholly self-inflicted.”

Though the company justified its original action on the grounds that the books had been uploaded into Kindle from an unauthorized source, and though Amazon refunded the price of the zapped George Orwell books to customers, Bezos acknowledged that the affair was a public relations debacle.

Though E-Reads expressed a somewhat contrarian view of Amazon’s action, we also recognize that it opened far larger issues concerning the ability of corporations, or even governments, to reach into our homes, businesses and private lives and control what we read, watch, or communicate.

Not everyone is prepared to accept an apology and move on. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said “Unfortunately this matter requires more than just changing internal policy. The real issue here is Amazon’s use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users, and actual respect necessitates more than an apology – it requires abandoning DRM and releasing the Kindle’s software as free software.

For the full text of Bezos’s apology cl ick here.

Tags: Amazon, Kindle
Posted in All, Copyright and Piracy, E-book Industry (news) | 1 Comment »

Michael (E-Reads) wrote on July 24, 2009 at 8:12 am

I'm afraid I disagree with Peter Brown and his perspective of the broader implications.

I think the digital reading experience provided by the Kindle and Amazon cannot be equated with older notions about ownership and traditional physical books. The digital service industry is built around licenses, permissions, and tacit agreements about copyright. What would the Kindle be without its 3G cell phone service (a special license), or the internet cloud functionality of Whispernet, which is a service with terms of use agreements?

When we buy a book in a system comprised of those complex arrangements, what we're really doing is licensing the book for our use so long as those terms are offered. This isn't how we traditionally think about shopping for goods. But in the last 30 years, our society is increasingly becoming familiar with this arrangement, whether its music or movies or software. It's renting disguised as ownership. We have a hard time acknowledging that this is in fact happening under our noses while we stick to antiquated ideas of entitlement.

It may not seem fair, especially to those who like to reverse engineer and repurpose everything they purchase, but it is a perfectly valid business objective.

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