Interesting. Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from all of its customer’s Kindles. This action stirred angry debate about the ownership rights of Amazon, Apple, and other electronic media purveyors. Who owns the material on your Kindle and iPod/iPhone?
A Michigan high school student, Justin Gawronski, sued Amazon, claiming that not only did Amazon delete his copy of 1984, but they also took his “copious notes” as well. In effect, his Kindle ate his homework.
Bottom line, Amazon avoided a costly class action lawsuit by settling this case for $150,000. You can read the details of the settlement on Eric Engleman’s Amazon blog.
This is great! Amazon has released a new Kindle iPhone app. Here’s the link.
The Kindle iPhone app lets you download all your Kindle books on your iPhone and iPod Touch and let’s you read any of those books. Not as elegant a reading experience as you might find on the Kindle itself, but plenty readable. And the Kindle app even takes you to the same page you were on in your Kindle. Very cool!
Here’s my Kindle app in action, reading Michael Palin’s latest, The Monty Python Diaries:
Even better, you don’t even need to own a Kindle to purchase Kindle books. You just need an Amazon account.
I’ve been following all the brouhaha between Amazon and the Authors Guild. In a nutshell, the Amazon ships with a text-to-speech feature that turns any book you buy into a slightly creepy, but free, audio book.
The Authors Guild protested this move as being unfair to authors. I believe the real reason behind this protest was the thought that this free text-to-speech would eat into the sale of audio books. While I don’t think that is true in this version of the Kindle (just try to listen to more than 3 minutes of Kindle’s text-to-speech without driving your car into a tree), the existing free text-to-speech capability sets a precedence that has significant future ramifications. In other words, when the Hugh Jackman text-to-speech Kindle ships, the audio book market might feel just collapse.
Many people have railed against Amazon for caving to the Authors Guild. I think they missed the point. I believe Amazon did exactly the right (and noble) thing by allowing authors to choose whether Kindle is allowed to text-to-speech their work. How could that be wrong? Amazon, as an author, I salute you!
This just in. This forum shows pictures of the new Kindle that look very real to me. According to the forum, Kindle 2 will go on sale for US$359 on February 24th, just a bit more than 2 weeks. Very cool!
