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catsittingstillDear Amazon,
I am a Kindle owner. I love my Kindle. I bought one when they were still four hundred dollars, and am the happy owner of a Kindle 2 and have been considering upgrading to a Kindle 3. I happily demonstrate it (usually the Kindle 2) to people and tell anyone who asks about its traits.
But part of your agreement with me is that when I buy books from you, you will store them in my archive, on your servers.
Now I discover that this isn't always the case. See here: http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-in-book-banning-business.html
I agree that you have the right to sell or pull books from the store as you see fit, (though I think this is a bad idea for reasons I will explain below.) However, once a customer has paid money for your service for a particular Kindle book, that service includes storing it in their personal archives on your servers. When Amazon breeches that service, of course Amazon owes them a refund; Amazon has not delivered the service for which the customer paid. And the reported rudeness of the customer service representative--well, do I need to point out that being rude to a customer, for buying a product your company sold, is the height, or perhaps the depth, of poor customer service?
This affects me, not because I have any particular interest in incest erotica, but because, if you breech the terms of service for another customer, how can I be confident that you won't breech the terms of service for me? How can I, in good conscience, recommend the Kindle to others?
Always before, when 1984 was mentioned, I would explain that you had tried to set things right with generous refund terms and that it was such a public relations disaster for you you would obviously never do it again.
What can I say now? You *have* done it again--or very nearly--and in the process not just defrauded a few customers but also made a liar, or at least a well intentioned but obviously uninformed and naive advocate, not just out of me but out of many other people who defended you.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to point out that this move was... poorly thought out.
Additionally I am concerned that, because of the size of your market share, censoring books will have a chilling effect on what books are written at all. Authors who hope to have access to the whole market must censor themselves so they can be confident you will sell their book. And since you have released no clear guidelines, and since rewriting a "pulled" book to remove the ill-defined objectionable content would be an enormous amount of time and effort, it follows authors will err on the side of caution and censor themselves more harshly than they believe you will censor them.
When it comes to erotica I care only about the principle, but how can an author be sure, in the absence of clear rules, that it does extend only to erotica? For example, if an investigative reporter considers writing a book about the effects of the Wikileaks revelations on cleaning up bad behavior that had festered in the dark of government secrecy for decades, she is going to care about whether Amazon will carry it. If she thinks, because of some incident in Amazon's behavior toward Wikileaks, for example, that Amazon might not sell it, she is likely to direct that year and a half of effort toward investigations for some other book instead--a book about fixing horse races, perhaps--and the book about the effects of Wikileaks never sees the light of day.
Whole fields of opinion or inquiry could dry up if the public gets the idea that Amazon censors books. People who oppose censorship might also decide to take their business elsewhere, which could hurt Amazon's bottom line.
I encourage you to re-think this policy, to either stop censoring or to issue clear and unmistakeable guidelines and then stick to them (though I will note that one of the reasons the Supreme Court frequently ends up being hostile to censorship is the difficulty of writing guidelines that can be evenhandedly applied to screen out "objectionable" material while still allowing socially useful material through even when it is unpopular.) I encourage you, in addition, to refund the money of customers whose purchases you have deleted from the cloud, to refrain from deleting purchases in the future even if you decide to stop selling a book, and to make public your managers' encouragement of polite, respectful service to customers no matter what product they have bought from your company.
I realize this letter was long. I thank you for your time, if you have gotten this far. If you have not gotten this far, fear not; I intend to make it public on my blog and encourage others to send their own letters, so you are unlikely to miss out on these arguments.
Yours--Catherine Faber, faithful, if annoyed, Amazon customer.
------------------------------------------------
Later edit--I sent this letter to kindle-feedback@amazon.com, which I think is intended for Kindle owners. But it's not hard to find contact info for Amazon if you are not a Kindle owner, or want to send it a different way.
I am a Kindle owner. I love my Kindle. I bought one when they were still four hundred dollars, and am the happy owner of a Kindle 2 and have been considering upgrading to a Kindle 3. I happily demonstrate it (usually the Kindle 2) to people and tell anyone who asks about its traits.
But part of your agreement with me is that when I buy books from you, you will store them in my archive, on your servers.
Now I discover that this isn't always the case. See here: http://theselfpublishingrevolution.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazon-in-book-banning-business.html
I agree that you have the right to sell or pull books from the store as you see fit, (though I think this is a bad idea for reasons I will explain below.) However, once a customer has paid money for your service for a particular Kindle book, that service includes storing it in their personal archives on your servers. When Amazon breeches that service, of course Amazon owes them a refund; Amazon has not delivered the service for which the customer paid. And the reported rudeness of the customer service representative--well, do I need to point out that being rude to a customer, for buying a product your company sold, is the height, or perhaps the depth, of poor customer service?
This affects me, not because I have any particular interest in incest erotica, but because, if you breech the terms of service for another customer, how can I be confident that you won't breech the terms of service for me? How can I, in good conscience, recommend the Kindle to others?
Always before, when 1984 was mentioned, I would explain that you had tried to set things right with generous refund terms and that it was such a public relations disaster for you you would obviously never do it again.
What can I say now? You *have* done it again--or very nearly--and in the process not just defrauded a few customers but also made a liar, or at least a well intentioned but obviously uninformed and naive advocate, not just out of me but out of many other people who defended you.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to point out that this move was... poorly thought out.
Additionally I am concerned that, because of the size of your market share, censoring books will have a chilling effect on what books are written at all. Authors who hope to have access to the whole market must censor themselves so they can be confident you will sell their book. And since you have released no clear guidelines, and since rewriting a "pulled" book to remove the ill-defined objectionable content would be an enormous amount of time and effort, it follows authors will err on the side of caution and censor themselves more harshly than they believe you will censor them.
When it comes to erotica I care only about the principle, but how can an author be sure, in the absence of clear rules, that it does extend only to erotica? For example, if an investigative reporter considers writing a book about the effects of the Wikileaks revelations on cleaning up bad behavior that had festered in the dark of government secrecy for decades, she is going to care about whether Amazon will carry it. If she thinks, because of some incident in Amazon's behavior toward Wikileaks, for example, that Amazon might not sell it, she is likely to direct that year and a half of effort toward investigations for some other book instead--a book about fixing horse races, perhaps--and the book about the effects of Wikileaks never sees the light of day.
Whole fields of opinion or inquiry could dry up if the public gets the idea that Amazon censors books. People who oppose censorship might also decide to take their business elsewhere, which could hurt Amazon's bottom line.
I encourage you to re-think this policy, to either stop censoring or to issue clear and unmistakeable guidelines and then stick to them (though I will note that one of the reasons the Supreme Court frequently ends up being hostile to censorship is the difficulty of writing guidelines that can be evenhandedly applied to screen out "objectionable" material while still allowing socially useful material through even when it is unpopular.) I encourage you, in addition, to refund the money of customers whose purchases you have deleted from the cloud, to refrain from deleting purchases in the future even if you decide to stop selling a book, and to make public your managers' encouragement of polite, respectful service to customers no matter what product they have bought from your company.
I realize this letter was long. I thank you for your time, if you have gotten this far. If you have not gotten this far, fear not; I intend to make it public on my blog and encourage others to send their own letters, so you are unlikely to miss out on these arguments.
Yours--Catherine Faber, faithful, if annoyed, Amazon customer.
------------------------------------------------
Later edit--I sent this letter to kindle-feedback@amazon.com, which I think is intended for Kindle owners. But it's not hard to find contact info for Amazon if you are not a Kindle owner, or want to send it a different way.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 04:54 pm (UTC)Photographer & writer Ctein has an essay on some of the issues over at The Online Photographer. Quote: "I am very, very disturbed by a thought I've had, which is that leasing knowledge might become the norm. Certainly there are many powerful corporate interests want to see it go that way."
We treat many of the corporate services provided over the web as though the provider are regulated common carriers. In reality, the providers are no such thing, and provision of service is arbitrary. (Extended essay on censorship, including mention of the banning of feminist literature as obscene and the widespread blocking of Wikileaks not written for lack of time.)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 05:48 pm (UTC)Eli
no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 11:32 pm (UTC)Anyway, I own a Sony eReader and there's no DRM or control. I buy my books from Sony or from Borders and borrow eBooks for 3 weeks from my public liberry. I store all this stuff on my own hard drive. My Sony is made out of metal. It's cool.
By the way, I have a running account on Audible.com (now owned by Amazon) and they do store my audio library. They also upgrade-to-better-quality-audio all the books I've bought from them over the years.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 12:38 pm (UTC)They pulled a couple of books many people might find objectionable. They didn't mess with purchased copies on Kindles themselves, but they pulled them from the archives of the devices (each Kindle has an archive at Amazon of every Amazon book the owner purchased.) Since the archive is part of the service, I think that they either shouldn't have done that part, or they should have refunded the purchasers' money.
I'm glad you like your Sony; Sonys are fine e-book readers, widely respected for a quality build. When I got my Kindle I wanted the ability to highlight and annotate, which Sonys couldn't do (I think the newest member of the Sony line is now capable of this) and I needed something that would work with a Mac just as well as with a PC, which Sonys couldn't do either.
It's interesting that you say there is no DRM. For those readers who are unfamiliar with e-books, DRM is a characteristic of the e-book *files* rather than the e-book readers, which I thought were capable of reading DRM of a particular type or types, but which don't actually *require* DRM. I had thought that Sonys accepted DRM--just a different type from the type the Kindle accepts. I had also thought that ebooks sold in the Sony store had DRM on them.
Is that not the case? Are Sonys not capable of reading DRMed books? Are the Sony store's books DRM-free, like those from Baen and Fictionwise? That would be wonderful news. The more stores that sell DRM-free ebooks, the better.
I'm also curious how you like Audible's service. I have heard of it, but haven't used it myself; my major use for audio books would be driving and I don't do much of that right now, plus the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, while robotic, does provide a way of enjoying a story while driving. Do you keep a backup of your audio library on your hard drive? Or do you feel that Audible can be trusted?
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 02:15 pm (UTC)I also bought a small program called CALIBRE which allows me to download newspapers from around the world, and change the Author or Title of my ebooks. Did you know that 'Hamlet' was actually written by Kermit The Frog? It now says so on my Reader so I know it's true.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 02:29 pm (UTC)I've occasionally kinda sorta considered an e-book reader, but I've been putting the idea on the back burner as long as the DRM-enforced format wars continue.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 04:52 pm (UTC)And Barnes and Noble e-books are DRM-free?
Because that's totally cool; if they are really DRM-free I could buy them and convert them to mobi with Calibre and use them on my Kindle. But, um, are you sure? Because I would have thought I'd have heard about it when they decided to go DRM-free, and I haven't heard word one.
Yes, the Gutenberg Project books (and those of sites that get their books from them, like manybooks.net) are DRM-free. The books are all in the public domain so they can be freely copied, so there's no point in DRM. And Baen books are DRM-free and I think Samhain Publishing's books, and those are new books (as in, not so old as to be out of copyright.) I'm not familiar with all the small publishers--I wish there was some sort of central marketplace for DRM-free books from small publishers, actually. Anyway, Baen has been doing this for at least a decade at this point.
I'm also kind of puzzled to see "Adobe PDF" described as "DRM-free" though. I thought pdf was a common format, not belonging to any company (like rtf or txt or jpg) that was normally DRM-free and "Adobe PDF" was the DRMed version. Is that not the case?
I have read about Calibre, though I haven't used it yet. It sounds like a great program and its writer is always coming up with new updates and so on to let it do more stuff. Like Stevemb, I thought it was free.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-17 04:04 pm (UTC)Calibre is free, but I sent him five dollars donation. I just forgot that was the process.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 02:30 pm (UTC)Audible uses many publishers, including Recorded Books. On Audible's site is a limited comments section (only open to people who bought the book from them) which is useful to hear praise or whining about the narration. As to trusting them with my library, I've been around the World Wide Web and to quote Dorothy, "people come and go so quickly around here." I like Audible's library function, which also tells me when I've already purchased a book I'm about to buy. But I also like to own the files at home. Trust, but verify.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 04:54 pm (UTC)The Kindle store will also tell me when I'm about to re-purchase a book. I'm not sure if the Baen Books website will or not--I haven't accidentally bought the same book twice and it hasn't occurred to me to try it on purpose :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 08:09 pm (UTC)Phone numbers that work, email, so many back doors to get through the phone mail and myriad other ways corporations try to use to keep complaints at bay.
I used it once to contact, on a direct line, a VP of Oracle. It's amazing how quickly a complaint goes away when a VP calls and says 'I don't want to hear from this guy again, take care of him.' I smiled for days.