WASHINGTON (AFP)--Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Saturday fended off
accusations of Big Brother-like behavior after it quietly erased
two George Orwell books from customers' electronic book readers
this week.
From Thursday, customers on Amazon's web forums said copies of
the British author's dystopian classics "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen
Eighty-Four" were mysteriously wiped from their Kindle devices.
The online retailer later told CNET the books were uploaded by a
publisher who didn't have reproduction rights and so they were
deleted.
"We removed the illegal copies from our systems and from
customers' devices, and refunded customers," spokesman Drew
Herdener said.
The move drew unfavorable comparisons to events in Orwell's
"Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which documents unfavorable to a
fictional authoritarian government are dropped into a "memory
hole," to be erased forever.
Herdener said the system would be changed so books wouldn't be
erased in future.