Madam, – In the otherwise excellent article on the coming of the Amazon Kindle (Weekend Review, October 10th) your writer neglected to mention one of the drawbacks of the new e-reader.
Contrary to popular belief, you cannot buy electronic books from Amazon, only pay for the licence to them on a long-term basis, subject to withdrawal or deletion. This surprising fact came to light this year when Amazon withdrew copies of two books from all its customers’ Kindles at a publisher’s request without consultation (although a full refund was issued at the same time).
As a warning of the concentration of power that this situation entails and also further proof that our transatlantic cousins have some difficulty with the concept of irony, one of the titles concerned was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. – Yours, etc,