And they wonder why piracy lives on

Today Amazon basically told every single Kindle owner that they don’t really own anything that they buy through the company. As far as Amazon is concerned they have complete say on whether or not you can keep a book you thought you paid for.

Think not?

Well think again because as any Kindle owner who had paid good money for an electronic copy of George Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm found out this morning this isn’t the case. This happened because the publisher of the two books decided that they didn’t want to make electronic versions of the books available after all and applied pressure on Amazon to fix the problem.

The fix of course was to delete all downloaded versions of the books from people’s Kindles. Granted their accounts were credited with what the books had cost but that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve just been told we don’t really own anything we buy in digital form – especially when the seller has a direct way to delete that product.

As David Pogue wrote in a post today

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

It is this kind of thing that leads me to believe that the more we move into the cloud the less we will actually ever own anything anymore.