OK, you really can’t make this up: Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, remotely, from users’ Kindle devices overnight. The owners of the books (and, yes, they were owners) were compensated for the loss, but that’s just ridiculous on several levels — not least because of the Orwell connection.
Now, I understand that Amazon’s action didn’t actually, theoretically, violate its Terms of Service. But for goodness’ sake, if you buy something (and pay actual money for it) you expect to be able to hang on to it pretty much forever. I understand that at some future point, I might lose access to some of the music I purchased through iTunes — say, if my computer dies — or I might drop a CD in the lake. Either way, I’ve been able to have it and enjoy it for a period of time and I was the one to decide when I was done with it. It simply doesn’t pass the smell test for copyright owners to be able to pull back their products anytime, anywhere.
If nothing else, this is a great argument for buying a reading device that doesn’t connect wirelessly back to a provider’s server. Or, as BoingBoing suggested, visit a site in another country where our copyright laws don’t apply.
In other early 1980s news, an artist has made a mockup of Apple’s home page as though it were 1983. Some parts made me laugh out loud, but I have to wonder about the overall aesthetic of the Web site — he’s replicating Apple’s current typefaces and corporate look, just with old product shots. Would have been even better if the type were in Chicago.
Also, Robert Niles has a good post out today about how early tools for putting newspapers online may have stifled innovation by making publishers perceive that Web production was difficult and unwieldy. (Overall Web production was difficult and unwieldy, too, of course, but I think he’s on to something here.) I won’t spoil the whole thing, but this gets to the meat of the argument:
When I moved to the Los Angeles Times website in January 2000, I was delighted to find that the Times staff (which numbered in the dozens) had written a series of scripts to move every article and some images from the paper’s print publishing systems onto the Web. But human staff needed to check the feed every morning, to see that it had come through uncorrupted. Several mornings, it hadn’t, and tech staff needed to debug and restart the feed.
Still, Times online editors hard-coded most top stories in HTML, manually editing images in Photoshop and building index pages by hand.
As long as that system lasted, it was expensive (staffing costs) and time-consuming to build Web pages. So papers invested in expensive, complex software and were reluctant to abandon it in favor of early blogging and commenting tools — the sunk costs alone would argue against it. Depressing, but interesting.
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