Don't know if you guys remember this, but awhile back Amazon remotely wiped copies of the book 1984 off of Kindles because they didn't end up having rights to sell it. There was a public backlash... where do you draw the line between what a customer owns and what a seller can legally do? These people bought the book, they owned the book, in many cases they were reading it or taking notes, and Amazon just unilaterally wiped the books (and notes) out. It's horribly ironic that the book they were remote-wiping was 1984.

Now they're apparently wiping out books that include incest. I didn't know Steve Jobs owned a chunk of Amazon. At this point, I'm never buying a Kindle... remote-wiping a device (or anything off of a device) that's owned by a consumer is unacceptable for any reason. doing it because it goes against your corporate morality? Seriously? Do corporations have morality? Or are they just projecting the morality of their cock-gobbling, mother-humping CEOs onto their clients?

At any rate, I guess I'll be heading in the direction of a Nook when I finally decide to go for an e-reader.

My old man bought a Kindle a couple of weeks ago. I think i'll put this point across to him.

Personally, the incest thing is understandable. I don't give a damn about what people do with their personal free time, but i'm assuming the number of people this impacts is negligible, so it's ok to block it. But then the flipside is, who gives a shit? Perhaps Amazon are scared that the Kindle will get some bad rep as if they're targetting the Paedophile niche of consumers that will brand the product as the next taboo sex toy. Personally I can't see this happening but whatever. I'm sure Amazon have a marketing analyst on 60k a year thinking this shit up, and that he's doing a good job justifying his position

As for removing the books, i'd say this is an error that would require Amazon to award the related customers special treatment beyond a refund. E.g. Vouchers or some shit. The crime I see is that they could have made books available for which they didn't have rights, used that to help launch the product and grab the market, then suddenly turn around and say "oops, our mistake... YOINK". That sounds like illegal trading to me. Drawing in customers, promising a service and then retiring it. Of course, whether Amazon intentionally did this or not is unknown, but it certainly feels like there should be some statuatory regulation on this shit. Does the government know the rate and size of these problems, nationally? Consumer protection is becoming more complex, which as far as I know, is of course dealt with legislatively, but I question whether the government should at least be monitoring this issue.

I wouldn't exactly assume that an analyst getting paid 60k knows his ass from his head, let alone make good market decisions. There were a lot of hideously overpaid 'risk managers' and 'financial analysts' that didn't see the crash coming and even made it a lot worse, so yeah... As an example: researchers have let people randomly throw darts at a Wall Street stock chart vs. millions-a-year salary high powered stockbrokers handpicking them, and it turns out that they barely are more accurate (and taking into account other factors, even probably weren't). Always question the advice of any expert on anything that is not hard science, for most of them have no clue what they're saying.

I think it's an outrage of epic proportions myself. What's next, ban books with homosexuality in them? Bestiality? Rape? Violence? I doubt amazon is selling any books that are praising incest and/or peadophilia as wholesome activities to begin with. Rather we're talking about books here that reference or feature incest as a subject in any capacity. So that means

Oedipus
Hamlet
The Cider House Rules
The Manchurian Candidate
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Just about every origin myth (Greek, Roman, Norse,...)

And many many more. It's an incredibly worrying move. A book sales company shouldn't be worrying about the content of the books they're selling unless it's outright hatespeech, porn or defending/promoting fucked up shit like incest. They should sell me my motherfucking books that happen to have themes in them they don't like and stfu.

The recalling books they didn't own thing is way less worrying than this. One is about societal trends and censorship, the other is about customer rights. While I obviously believe these are important too, I'd rather have a book recalled that I can still buy in its original form than not being able to buy the book at all (from a moral pov).

I'm with Ox... this sets an extremely troubling precedent. These books aren't illegal... they're completely legal and were sold through Amazon. People bought them, then Amazon deleted them with no notice or recourse. It's inexcusable. It's perfectly acceptable for amazon to never offer the book for sale... their store, their merchandise, I'm cool with that. But it's like walking into a regular bookstore, buying a book, then two weeks later people from the book store break into your house, take back the copy and burn it in your driveway. Maybe not quite so bad, since there's no breaking and entering involved (it's like the bookstore has a private tunnel into your house). But you get the idea.

lolz @ being ok with censoring Hamlet.