Orwellian: Amazon.com Remotely Deletes "1984," "Animal Farm" from Kindles

This morning, amazed Amazon Kindle owners realized that someone had seemingly managed to "steal" some of their e-books from their Kindle. In reality, the books had been remotely deleted by Amazon.com. Not because the books were illegal copies (which has happened in the past), but because the publisher decided it no longer wanted to sell e-book versions of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm."

Yet, it still might seem to end users that they had the books stolen from them, because they bought them, paid for them legitimately. Of course, they will receive refunds, but that's not the point.

Here's what customer service said:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

In what's definitely ironic, considering the inclusion of "1984" among the e-books, it's a Big Brother moment.

While there is quite the uproar about this on the Internet, since the publisher changed their mind, it's not something Amazon.com did egregiously. One suggestion, per the forum (one which sorta runs against the grain if they do try to delete an e-book from your Kindle):

Actually, if you want to ensure that you are able to keep ALL copies of your Kindle books, make sure to ALWAYS download copies of your Kindle book purchases to your computer. That way, even if Amazon removes a book from your Kindle at any point that you have Whispernet on, you can reload that book onto your Kindle via the copy from your computer.

Of course, in that case, you've ended up with a pirated book. Ah, well.