Amazon apologises for taking unfair advantage of Kindle customers
A couple of weeks back Amazon took unfair advantage of their heavily content secured Kindle eBook reader. The Kindle loads books that are embedded with digital rights management (DRM) and is permanently connected to a mobile data network allowing quick access to Amazon’s online book store and (as reported) big brother access to the device.
After removing George Orwell’s Animal Farm automatically from all Kindle devices Amazon made this statement:
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 occurred, 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.
This was later on followed by an apology.
The lesson learned is that DRM is bad.