During the night of July 16th, while Amazon Kindle owners slept, Amazon was quietly deleting their copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for - thought they owned.

Late last week, Amazon deleted purchased copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from the ebook readers of hundreds of users. They were able to do this because of proprietary software and Digital Restrictions Management. Amazon doesn't say anything about DRM on the Kindle's page, so it's up to us to write reviews to let people know about it.

Earlier today we reported that Amazon had acquired AbeBooks, an online retailer of rare and used books from independent publishers.

Amazon's recent remote deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm struck a nerve. There was something so undeniably creepy about a company entering hundreds of virtual bookshelves in the middle of the night and deleting "1984" (of all books!).

"The Amazon kindle provides convenience, but at the cost of freedom. When you purchase a kindle, you must agree to use the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system. Since all of the Kindle ebooks you purchase from Amazon are in their proprietary DRM format, you are also promising to not share them with friends. And, because you promise to not circumvent the DRM, there is no way to move them to another device or a computer. You are locked into the Kindle and you are locked into Amazon. If you try to move them to a new ebook reader or a computer, Amazon can end your service and remove access to the books you have already purchased..."

via http://www.defectivebydesign.org/node/1096 (instructions on tagging - Kindle Swindle )

San Francisco bookstore Green Apple Books has put together a series of humorous videos that point up the advantages of paper books over Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.

"I fully intend to use everything I have learned thus far, and create the next generation of The Moon Books Project. It will be faster, easier to use, more professional and all around much more groovy! In the planning stages I have had the fortunate experience to find Packt Publishing.

It was unfortunately reported yesterday by a number of sources that Amazon had released the source code for the software running on the Kindle DX.
This isn’t all of the Kindle source code. It’s a selection released in order to comply with the license requirements of the code originally written by other people (like the GNU Project) which Amazon modified for its own purposes.