When is something you bought really yours?

[Bernie]

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.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com

[Videoskooter]

Shocking! That's why I always buy real books, real DVD's, real CD's (and even better: vinyls).

So I never cared for I-tunes, E-books and God forbid that newspapers will become fully digital in the future. There's nothing more cool than a freshly printed 1. I love the smell of black ink in the morning!

[kdavid13]

Shocking indeed.

That's why I always burn 3 copies of the albums I buy on iTunes. I play one,then use the other 2 as back-up copies. I prefer to buy the good old-fashioned CDs (I want the liner notes...) but when they're hard to find and I see stuff available for $9.99 - I go digital...until I find the actual CD.

[paul]

Tin foil hat time. This means I'm going conspriacy nuts here. 1984 and Animal Farm are subversive books. They might awaken corrupted minds.

[BrunoRepublic]

Apparently it was something much simpler than that: Amazon never had permission to sell the books. Someone who was *not* the copyright owner uploaded them. It would be like a major record store discovering that they had unwittingly purchased counterfeit or bootleg albums and pulling them, the difference being that Amazon could pull them after they'd been sold.

Still, the implications aren't pretty.

[paul]

OK, I'll take off my tin foil hat then