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Dear 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.
