Comment by rcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcoder | Hacker News Reader

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From what I saw on the Kindle forums, the publisher of these editions (MobileReference) mostly offers $0.99 downloads of public-domain texts. There's a $10 version of 1984 still available for purchase from Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four/dp/B002A9JO9W

So, it looks to me like this was a case of a publisher illegally distributing a book to which they had no license. As an analogy, think of people who buy a bootleg DVD from a flea market while traveling overseas, only to discover it won't play in their region-locked DVD player at home. Yes, it sucks that DRM prevented them from using media they thought they had bought, but they also knew perfectly well that they were getting a deal that was just a little too good to be true.

If this was indeed the case then the better solution would have been for Amazon to pay the royalties to the copyright holder on the previous sales and quietly remove the 99 cent version from the store. This is a public relations disaster for the Kindle.

I disagree with your argument that people should have known this was too good to be true. Orwell has been dead for almost 60 years, 1984 will be public domain soon enough.

That assumes that it was simply an issue of royalty payments. Publishing agreements can have many more restrictions (only authorized content, limits to which markets can be served, editorial veto, etc.) that aren't just about paying $0.20/unit.

Regardless of the feasibility, I wouldn't expect Amazon to have any interest in creating a precedent of them paying to cover up for the mistakes of publishers on the Kindle store. Unlike many people, I actually think that yanking unauthorized books after download is totally reasonable, provided Amazon offers a detailed explanation of the reason.

disaster? are you kidding? I'm a kindle user and I could care less about this news.

Sure, but what about potential loss of sales of the kindle by more privacy conscious users?

Remember the Sony rootkit debacle a few years ago? No end users were really affected by it, but it was a huge PR disaster for them. Not saying that the current case is analogous but we cannot fortell how people will react to such sneaky behavior.

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