I don’t think Amazon did the right thing, but, we do need to think a little more about the implications of things going digital and what that means for our ownership of them.

What i mean by this is that our concept of how to deal with digital thing vs real life things needs to evolve so that people will naturally agree with how to handle issues like this.

People saying that it should be just like a physical book might be right, but i think that might be to simple of a view. I can do things with my ebook of 1984 i can’t easily so with my physical copy. It is clear that we as a society have not come to a consensus of how that changes our rights and responsibilities in regards to digital goods vs physical goods, and i have no idea what the right views truly should be.

With that said (if anyone is still reading this), Amazon should have given full disclosure about what happened and then upgraded everyone to a legal copy of the book.

One issue that has not been discussed is what about possible differences between the bootleg and the real thing? Now that would truly be Orwellian, but points to a bigger issue of trust with digital copies of books. We already know that Amazon can actually change the text of the books without telling us. This is so the publisher can make edits such as correcting spelling/grammar issues, or if the author decides to change something.

This is guess gets back to my original point of rights and responsibilities in a era of digital goods.

I think the kindle community needs to have a long discussion on this and force Amazon to explicitly state what they will and won’t do in a way that everyone know. A Kindle bill of rights so that everyone has a very clear idea of what can and can’t happen. This needs to be much more clear then the Terms of Service legalese they currently have.