I’ve been a fan of Amazon.com for far longer than they deserve; that’s how fanship works, I guess. And I’ll continue to shop there.

On this blog, I’ve usually linked books I’m discussing to the respective Amazon pages, in part because they usually have sizeable page previews. Others, most notably Google Books, have those same previews, but I’ve stuck with Amazon.

My recent work (grad-school in history) has had me open several books unavailable on Amazon, though. Some are foreign-language, but mostly it’s that they’re too old, or at least too old to have page previews (i.e. more than, say, ten years).

Most of those books are scanned and available in limited preview at google books, and suitable for citation in a blog. So I was already considering the move.

But a recent event around the Kindle has pushed me: the remote-controlled deletion from Kindle owners’ hard-drives of several books that had been mistakenly posted on the Kindle store without the publisher’s permission.

It was a few old books by George Orwell. People bought them on Amazon for their Kindles. The copyright holder notified Amazon of a violation, and Amazon withdrew the product to respect the copyright.

So far so good. It’s what they did next that concerns me: they remotely deleted it from customer’s computers. That they had this power shouldn’t surprise me; that they exercised it is very disturbing, even if the books were illegal.

It was as if a store gave away a product—a book, say—and subsequently discovered the store copy had been a stolen copy, and, rather than making amends with the publisher, secretly entered customers’ houses and took the books back.

The New York Times notes the great irony here: the books in question were 1984 and Animal Farm, about oppressive governments and fascism:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

But a more piercing critique comes from David Ulin at the LA Times:

Meanwhile, we embrace Amazon and the Kindle with little real consideration for what it all means, as we move increasingly toward an electronic model for intellectual and literary life. Much of the talk about the digital future has to do with its inevitability, but though that may be true, it overlooks more subtle questions of engagement and control.

For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than mere commerce that shouldn't be merely bought and sold.