Amazon has remotely wiped a book that people had already purchased for the Kindle (an ebook reader).
As John Gruber notes:
It’s one thing to stop selling them. It’s something else entirely to remove them from the Kindles of those who already bought them. That this happened with1984, of all the books that have ever been written, is simply incredible.
(Point of comparison: when apps get yanked from the App Store, they don’t get deleted from the iPhones of people who already bought them.)
I don’t care what reason Amazon has for this. If the book shouldn’t have been sold they should have stopped it in the first place.
This is a very different world to that of the free and open internet; this is the world of “internet appliances,” where the companies that sell these products have remote control over them. I feel cagey enough about owning an iPhone, which is also an internet appliance, but there’s no way I’m going near the Kindle after this episode.