Amazon Apologizes For Kindle Flap

[rrneck]

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/drm/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218600600

In a brief but pointed statement Thursday, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for removing copies of e-books from customers' Kindles last week, a move that angered consumers and forced Amazon to defend what appeared to be arbitrary and controlling behavior.

Why didn't Amazon just extract the illegal book and replace it with a legal copy? My bet is that they were trying to save a dime and caused a multi million dollar flap.

[Curtland1015]

1. "Kindle Flap", is that some kind Swedish beer?

:shrug:

[rrneck]

5. Or something like this?

[Indydem]

2. My understanding; there are no legal copies. No legitimate license available. n/t

[rrneck]

3. Ah. Thanks. nt

[MADem]

4. What they should have done is just left what was on the Kindle there, and settled with the

people from whom their middleman got the illegal copies. Then, they should have sued the middleman.

What they did was just wrong. It was the best "Don't Buy This Thing" ad they ever could have put out. I'm completely uninterested in the technology now, whereas before I was toying with the idea of splurging on one. But why bother when they can "take back" on a whim, or even edit out what could be, in the future, "objectionable" material?

[rrneck]

8. Yeah. When I was in the office furniture business

and a screwup happened it wasn't really embarrassing unless we couldn't fix it without the customer finding out about it. That was always the big question; "Are we busted?"

If they're going to sell a piece of electronic equipment that ostensibly replaces a book, then the same "book" rules should apply. People are willing to suffer EULA's for the luxury of updates, but nobody at Amazon wrote that book, so it should belong to whoever downloaded it.

Not to mention the data mining possibilities for crooked governments if they should decide to go that way.

[KamaAina]

6. When are they going to apologize for not making Kindles accessible to people who are blind?

Again, they caved in to the almighty Rights Owners, in this case over audio books. Kindles were built with a screen reader-like feature. Audio book copyright owners claimed infringement. Amazon basically bent over and dropped trou for them, throwing access to the four winds. :grr: :banghead:

[Ian David]

7. The Kindle Flap is the bottom part of the human foreskin. n/t