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Burning Books – Digitally
- webmaven 6y agoSomehow, this article managed to completely miss the incident when Amazon relegated an edition of 1984 to the memory hole by removing previously purchased copies from people's kindles, remotely. Now that was a dystopian moment. By contrast, Amazon de-listing a title and deciding not to carry it anymore is hardly something to get worked up about. The only cause for concern here is Amazon's monopolistic dominance of book and ebook sales, as no-one should be able to force a retailer to carry a book. OTOH, leaning on Amazon to get Kindles to open standard EPUB files, letting users purchase ebooks (on the Kindle) from alternate bookstores, or otherwise giving users more control over the device they own, those would be interventions worth considering.