Orwell, Kindle and another great own goal for the electronic media industry

One of the risks of owning digital media is that in many cases the supplier's hidden claw is there long after purchase. This was made obvious when people realised that there was a reproduction limit on the number of times they could move their own (paid for) copy of iTunes songs, and was really brought to the fore when Microsoft and Google turned off DRM on media services, rendering a whole lot of (paid for) collections useless and offering scant recompense (See our coverage here).

The obvious conclusion there was don't buy digital music through any form of proprietary system - if you pirate it, or buy CD's it stays yours.

Next up in the digital media own goal stakes is the Amazon Kindle, which has turned off hundreds of users' (paid for) copies of George Orwell's books. Gloriously ironic, as the EFF notes:

In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist Winston Smith labors in obscurity to make information appear and disappear at the whims of the Ministry of Truth:

This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

It would appear the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition of Orwell's books, and according to the NYT apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved in.

Lesson for anybody that wants to learn it is don't buy a Kindle, either buy the book in (uncancellable) paper or pull it off the 'Net and put it on your PC/IPod/etc where it stays safe. By the way, the prices of eBooks vs their costs make music prices look positively tame.