Melville House Books

Jeff Bezos may have “offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa” regarding Amazon‘s secret deletion of books from thousands of Kindles, but “An apology was not enough for many people,” reports Brad Stone in a New York Times story. Now, he says, “A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books ….”

In fact, the Free Software Foundation is even organizing a petition signed by “librarians, publishers and major authors and public intellectuals” and asking Amazon “to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles, and to reconsider its use of the software called digital rights management, or D.R.M. The software allows the company to maintain strict control over the copies of electronic books on its reader and also prevents other companies from selling material for the device,” reports Stone.

D.R.M., he says, is a difficult concept for people when it comes to books because it creates a situation where “people do not so much own, but rent this media. And the rental agreement can be breached by the manufacturer at any time, sometime with little or no notice.”

Equally if not more worrisome is something the 1984 deletion has highlighted — “that the very architecture of network-connected devices like the Kindle, TiVo or iPod give tech companies unprecedented control over digital media and by extension, the free exchange of ideas.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.