Jul 31 2009Teen Suing Amazon For Deleting Book From Kindle, Or, Why I Don't Have My Homework

Now thats just ridiculuos... grow up

Do Americans seriously sue anyone that sneezes in their general direction?

Oh hai

@ GW

Do you need help with your homework?..........come on man, I can help!!!

#2 the French?
Oh wait that's farts.

It's mostly maui wowi, but its got some labrador in it...

really blew the dogs mind!

who buys a kindle anyway?!

Well I think the kid has a good point here. The issue is that Amazon should not be able to go and take a book from your kindle. They gave no warning, went and took the book. They even admited they were in the wrong, well make a example out of them and now they will make sure to put a nice warning out there, hey things can happen, your book may be taken from us for no apparent reason, now deal with it.

reason #234 to read books printed on paper.

Amazon can't randomly take it back from you.

I do find it funny that the books deleted were "1984" and "Animal Farm".

Oh, irony, I love it when it rears it's head.

"War is Peace. Wrong is Right. Good is Bad. Big Brother loves You!"

"All animals are equal. Some are more equal than others."

FAKE!!!!

This is a complete photoshop job. You can tell its a fake because the shadow's are all wrong.

This is exactly like that scene in the movie Never Back Down where Max hurt his arm and the way it healed allowed him to throw a super fast fastball. He got a job pitching for a major League team, and had a great summer.

i fully support this kid's decision to sue amazon. even though the kindle has the notes, IT IS WORTHLESS without the passages. and to find the passages would take alot of work. it would take alot of guessing to find the passages again. i hope this kid wins.

also, batman is right...it's a complete invasion of privacy. if you went to the store, bought a movie, took it home, the store has no right to take it away from you, especially without telling you.

Look at me, I'm rearing my head!!

Muah ha ha ha ha!!!

@12. Duh, Batman is always right. He's Batman.

See.. http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/I%27mBatman.jpg

"I'm Batman"

The people bitching about it being a frivilous lawsuit don't understand.

This is not about some dumb kid losing his homework.

It's about setting a legal precedent that companies who put out devices like the kindle do not have a right to revoke content that now resides on peoples' devices.

Without this precedent being set, companies can continue to backdoor and delete content you've paid for at will. That screws you, the consumer. Bellyache all you want, but this is a lawsuit to help the consumer. Frankly, after reading about this, I would never buy a Kindle or any other e-reader knowing someone could just delete my stuff without my knowledge or authorization.

The apology was lipwork. Amazon made the screw-up in the sales, so the proper thing to have done was to pay the fees to make the copies which were downloaded legit - NOT delete content.

I hope they win the lawsuit.

Can someone give me the Cliff's Notes on Milkman's statement. It's late on Friday and that's a lot of text, and what little brain I have is shutting down.

kthxbye

Agreeing with Milkman 100%.
Many lawsuits are frivolous, but this one isn't. Some people may see "my homework was deleted" and think it is, but the real point is that Amazon deleted content that people paid for without their prior consent or even prior notice.

@16-

Amazon bad.

Lawsuit not frivolous.

Yes I am always right, now if Superman could just learn this, we would all be in a better place.
And yeah some people may stay with ther old paper books, but when you purchase something to make your life better, and clear out those shelves of books and put it on your Kindle, you expect it too work like how it is suppose too.
This would be like if Apple was able to go take songs from your ipods.
This has nothing to do with the homework getting messed up, this is totally Amazon taking that book from Kindle, and they deserve to win. And Amazon needs to work on the programming or give better warnings.
But hey also, this is a really good reason to give too your teacher why you didn't finish your homework. And this may have hurt his grades, which could end up hurting how much he can make later in his life. So this could be at least millions this kid should get because of Amazon screwing his homework over.
And all of you still using those old paper books, well it must suck to have to get some glasses on to read those small prints, when I can just zoom up into my book, so yeah bite me. And get with the technology!! Of course it will take Apple to finally get a working book, but we will live with this Amazon technology until than.

See. Batman is always right, he's Batman.

http://slog.thestranger.com/files/2008/07/GoddamnBatman.jpg

Cheese.

@19 Sooooo, if you're always right how come your DEAD?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/02/so_yeah_batmans_dead_or_someth_1.html

That is... if you really are the REAL Batman, or should call you Dick!??!?!

DC continuity much f'd up right now

And, yeah, Amazon did bad.

Dick as in...

http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Batman_%28Dick_Grayson%29

Hey, you sass that hoopy Geekologie Writer? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is.

"Gawronski". That's a pretty jewish-sounding name there.

BIG SURPRIS

@19
All your points are pretty valid except for that nonsense about amazon screwing up the kids entire life. A mass market copy of 1984 only costs a few dollars and he is completely and utterly able to go get it, skim back through, and connect his notes to the passages. Hey, if his notes are as "copious" and great as they're saying it should be really easy to remember what they connected to...

Yes the circumstances suck. Yes amazon was a douche for basically stealing from it's own customers. No it is not amazon's fault that this kid is an idiot moron who can't fathom the concept of paper.

I even agree that the customers should sue. But all this crap about it being amazons fault that this kid can't finish his work is just whiny scapegoating bull. Next week he'll be suing microsoft because Office had a fatal error while he was writing his report.

amazon is the bullocks

@11

FAKE!!!!

This is a complete photoshop job. You can tell its a fake because -- shut the f.uck up daisy

Hey, anyone sass that hoopy Geekologie writer? now there is a frood who really knows where his towel's at. Oh yeah, and remember, six times nine is forty two. So long and Thanks for All the Fish!

@29 damn you! you pretty much said every thing i was going to say!

Ok. I DO agree from a legal standpoint that this will help establish precidence, and I also see the irony in that the book happened to be 1984. However when I was in school - and I graduated Summa C*m (ha - Geekologie won't let me write "c*m" - lawsuit!) Laude from a top-rated university - I can recall COUNTLESS times my PC crashed while I was in the middle of numerous papers, including my thesis - a 70-page parallel of B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning & "A Clockwork Orange" (great paper, by the way). I never thought of suing Microsoft. Or Gateway. It bites, but we live in a digital age. Computers make mistakes, as do companies. It all comes down to what Amazon's user agreement states, & that's up to the lawyers to dispute. I wholeheartedly disagree that the kid's future could be seriously affected; that's preposterous, but there DOES need to be precidence set in some regard to protect consumers. Oh, and FYI for the comment #25 above regarding the kid's name - I'm Jewish. You know what I did? Sucked up the loss of 60+ pages, redid my thesis, aced my paper & bought a Mac. I'm interested to see what happens, but I suspect Amazon will settle.

is it just me, or is there something incredibly ironic in those book choices, lol

Now this is ridiculous.

Amazon deleted my life, but you don't see me suing them.

>.>

@31
I suppose the difference here would be that Amazon knowingly deleted content that customers legally bought, while Windows just has shoddy programming.
This would be more comparable to buying Windows, then buying Microsoft Office only to later be told that you are no longer allowed to use Microsoft Office if you do not purchase it again.

I can't imagine what was running through the head of the Amazon exec that thought this debacle was a good move.

"now needs to recreate all of his studies"

This is summer reading we're talking about here, not a Master's thesis.

This is why the Kindle sucks.
Sony's PR-505 is the superior device for a million other reasons, and this example here just increased that list to a million and one.

why did amazon delete those books anyway?

@37:

"Amazon had said publicly that it had deleted the books because they were added to its catalogue by a third party who did not have the rights to the book."

Like I said before, it all depends on how Amazon's user agreement is written, & how the lawyers will dispute it.

@34:
I do see your point & it makes sense. Amazon wasn't asking the people they deleted the books from to repurchase though - this wasn't an attempt to make more money on their part; the irony is that they simply had to remove the books because their initial upload violated Amazon's policies. However, you're right - it is NOT up to the consumer to research which books violate Amazon's policies, & would therefore be subject to deletion. They should have given warning to those that purchased said books. It's not like they didn't have total access to those buyers.

And it's strange that 2 complete classics would have been uploaded by 3d-party sources. Amazon should have had these books in their library regardless.

Even if the original upload was illegitimate, Amazon doesn't have the right to invade consumers' privacy like that. It's like tapping into people's phones, sleuthing through their computer files, or hijacking their iPods. I really wanted a Kindle, but I'm not going to give my money to a company that totally disregards my privacy. They can use whatever legal jargon they want saying "we have the right to erase all your crap on a whim if we so choose" in the future, but I won't deal with them. They will lose more money this way than if they'd just let the issue drop. It was a stupid move.

#31- have you been thinking of ways to interject how awesome you are into random conversation? If you talk like that in real life, people will dismiss you as a braggart and a bore. Your comments about your 'great' thesis and GPA came off as a narcissistic tangent rather than a pertinent anecdote.

So the kid couldn't pick up one of the many mass-market paperback editions of '1984' at a local used-bookstore for less than 50 cents, let alone his local library, but could find a lawyer's office no problem?

Also, the book is usually assigned to students around the 15-17 year old age group. If it runs over 220 pages, it's a printing with larger-than-usual font size. It's nowhere near thick enough to be more than an hour's or so inconvenience to re-find the passages in question, especially based on the notes.

Yes, going to a Lawyer's Office to start legal action is a much more efficient use of your time, you lazy, spoilt hipster kid.

I agree with Milkman.

But still... GET A REAL BOOK. It can never be deleted. Only by fire...

...fvcking fire.

#40

A. I AM awesome, and if I REALLY wanted you to know precisely how awesome I am, I'd probably not be an anonymous poster on a page. I'd have used my real name, douchetard. I'm proud of my thesis, and I used my example to illustrate how miniscule this kid's issue is in the scheme of the real world, although Amazon does need to take responsibility for invading consumers' privacy rights.

B. I AM like this in real life. Not only do I NOT give off the air of narcissism, but I am as humble as they come. I had a point & I stated it. In fact, when poster #34 added their 2¢, I didn't argue my initial point, I opened my mind up to admit they had a good point of their own.

C. B. I was making a valid point. Too bad you feel insecure enough about yourself to have to insult my comment. You spot it, you got it, sunshine.

@26

When it comes to lawsuits you have to come up with a damage amount. Obviously the price of an e-book wouldn't be much of a deterrent to Amazon. But by suing for the time it took him to "re create his studies" they can assign the kid a dollar amount per hour, multiply it by the # of hours, and get a higher amount out of it. Not that $20 per hour x 20 hours is gonna be much money to Amazon, but it helps drive the point home harder.

The rest of the people who said "just get a book" are pretty much right. If this is the sort of thing that wll happen, I'm sure people will continue to rely on printed media and this technology will not ever progress. Amazon literally shot itself in the foot.

Does anyone else out there find Amazon deleting the book "1984" from a user's Kindle morbidly ironic?

Must See!!

http://75684.onodot.com/

I would like to say this, everyone says the kid could have picked up the paper back copy, but true as this is. The issue isn't all that, it is Amazon doing something wrong by taking the book. Also I can't imagine it easy to go through the paperback in the timefram to turn your assignment in, when you had all this ready on the Kindle, and suddently bam it is gone. You make ti sound easy but it wouldn't be easy if your timeline didn't expect to have the book taken from Kindle.
yeah it sucks for the kid, and yes he could get a paper back but still Amazon had no right to just take the book like that.

The kid is lying.
Even if the book had been deleted from his kindle, the notes and stuff are saved in a special text file which is separate and NOT related to the text file.

The kid is lying.
Even if the book had been deleted from his kindle, the notes and stuff are saved in a special text file which is separate and NOT related to the kindle/book file.

Re: In response to Amazon's remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm

Hi there,

Saw you'd written about the Amazon / 1984 flap, and I thought you might be
interested in the petition we launched yesterday:

http://defectivebydesign.org/amazon1984

We have over 1400 signatures already, and signers include Lawrence Lessig,
Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow and other notable authors, librarians, and
scholars.

The petition opens:

"We believe in a way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which
books have and will continue to play a central role. Devices like Amazon's
are trying to determine how people will interact with books, but Amazon's
use of DRM to control and monitor users and their books constitutes a clear
threat to the free exchange of ideas."

Please have a look, and if you support the cause or think it would be
interesting to your readers, a blog post would be great!

Thanks,

-Holmes Wilson
Free Software Foundation

Vicky wrote: "Even if the book had been deleted from his kindle, the notes and stuff are saved in a special text file which is separate and NOT related to the kindle/book file."

Apparently the notes are there, but the way the kindle specifies the text they apply to doesn't include the source text of the book, doesn't use page numbers, and won't necessarily be the same with a different edition of the book.

It's hardly insurmountable. It'd probably not take more than a couple of hours and a library copy of 1984 to find the passages to which the notes apply.

Assuming he was actually the person who wrote the notes, and he didn't crib them from someone else.

But anyway, there's another issue. I love my kindles, but I can't think of a worse way to take copious notes.

I mean, if you're on an airplane or a bus? Sure. Jot some notes on the kindle and then when you get a chance transcribe them to something that isn't insane. Like a word processor on your laptop. Or maybe some 3x5 cards, or a pad of paper.

But to actually use it as the main repository for notes for a paper? That's nuts. There isn't even a comma on the keyboard.

This is such a great review!
This really gives ideas about the newest trends in technology.
Thanks for sharing this post!

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This introduces a new and helpful device. This seems to be an informative article.

thanks for posting!

as soon as i saw the words
daisy, and
FAKE!!
i instantly suicided.
i am suing daisy and anyone in the general vicinity for witnessing a murder.