Jim Lynch: Off the Top of My Head…

Well I’m sure by now you’ve probably heard about Amazon deleting certain books off of people’s Kindles without the permission of the Kindle owner:

Amazon.com shocked customers yesterday when it reached out to hundreds, if not thousands of Kindles and simply deleted texts that users had not only purchased, but had started to read. A literary coitus interruptus, Amazon spoiled the readers’ descent into Orwellian masochism with nary a warning or apology.

Sometime on Thursday, users had an eerie feeling that they were being watched, receiving emails stating that their purchases were being refunded. When they connected to the Kindle’s WhisperNet, the purchases in question were automatically deleted. Some could only wonder: how often could this happen? Perhaps the Thought Police Amazon Customer Service team could cut off your books whenever they wanted to.

I’ve been a big believer in the Kindle, having enjoyed the immediacy of downloading my favorite books and taking them with me anywhere. I really liked the product. But I’ve decided not to purchase any more Kindle books from Amazon.com. They simply cannot be trusted not to take the books back whenever they want.

Now I’ll grant you that Amazon refunded the payments for the books they deleted. Okay, so the customers got their money back. But once a sale has been made Amazon should NOT be able to touch those books without your permission. Under no circumstances should Amazon have the power to delete books from people’s Kindles without the explicit permission of the owner of the Kindle.

There are many lessons in this for all of us. Trusting one company like Amazon to do the right thing clearly doesn’t work. Proprietary ebook formats like Amazon’s that can so easily be abused by the company that controls them are a danger to us all. Many have warned about the dangers of DRM and digital content and now we see a horrific example of the abuse of that power by the company that controls the DRM in its products.

And what will be the end result of all of this? Well I think many people will be less inclined to buy Kindles for sure. And current Kindle owners like myself may stop buying ebooks from Amazon. But I also think that this will probably push people into pirating ebooks from places like the Pirate Bay or at the very least might mean that people only buy ebooks in open formats such as epub for devices that do not allow the device manufacturer to simply go into the device and remove whatever books they want, when they want.

Tim O’Reilly talked about the importance of open ebook formats and this awful behavior by Amazon.com only underscores what he was talking about in this article:

So it was with a feeling of deja vu that I listened in mid-2007 to the promises of Amazon about the potential of its new proprietary e-book platform. While no payment is required to participate, there are clearly onerous restrictions that could limit the growth of the market: a proprietary file format, and the requirement that the e-books only be sold by Amazon.com.

The file format was a problem for us from the get-go: Amazon’s Kindle file format doesn’t provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web’s native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first “strategy tax” paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can’t support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.

The single point of purchase was also a non-starter for us, since my fundamental understanding of information marketplaces is that they grow bigger and more lucrative for everyone when there is a rich ecosystem of cooperating players. (Here’s the text of a talk I gave on that subject back in 2000.)

History has already begun to repeat itself.

We’ve thrown our support behind epub and other open e-book standards, providing our books as “e-book bundles” that give the reader the choice of pdf (still the only viable choice for many highly formatted books like our Head First series of “brain friendly” tutorials that even HTML can’t handle), epub, and mobi, an HTML-based predecessor to the Kindle format that lacks digital rights management but that can be imported into the Kindle. To help jump-start the market, we’re hosting and supporting the free bookworm e-book reader.

Despite Amazon’s claims that they are changing their system so that this doesn’t happen again, I’m not buying it. I will be buying paper books from now on for the most part and if I buy an ebook it will be in an open format and not Amazons proprietary format. I will also be looking for an alternative ebook device and will eventually be phasing out my Kindle. I don’t want to own an ebook reader that allows the manufacturer to clandestinely delete all of my books with no warning and without my permission.

No thank you, Amazon. You had your chance with your proprietary format and you blew it. We trusted you and you violated our trust and you’ll never have that trust again. And neither will any other company. From now on it’s open formats only on devices that don’t allow you or anybody else to take our digital content without our permission.

Shame on you, Amazon.com.

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