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Amazon Can't Keep Its Kindle Promises

After reaching into some Kindles and deleting several copyrighted books, Amazon now says they made a mistake and won't do something like that again. No doubt, this whole affair has been a massive PR disaster for Amazon. But what happens if unauthorized copyrighted content finds its way into Amazon's catalog again?

Although DRM may be going away for music, the purveyors of print haven't yet learned their lesson about DRM. The Kindle's whole business model would have no doubt been a non-starter without those assurances to publishers. Even Steve Jobs' reality distortion field couldn't convince the music industry to let Apple launch the iPod with DRM-free music.

It's not as if Amazon is just paying lip service to DRM; they have integrated it heavily into the Kindle. Its book management system is built around your Amazon.com account; if you anger Amazon and manage to get your account suspended, your Kindle will stop working. Users have even run up against secret download limits preventing them from reading the books they have already purchased.

As long as Amazon continues to have the technical ability to remotely control the content on Kindles, they will end up in situations where copyright holders demand that they take back books -- that's why they call it a "copy right" after all. Retracting a copy of a book wasn't practical to do with printed books, but we're in a whole new world (perhaps a Brave New World) here. Amazon has made unbuying books not only practical, but easy. Now that rights holders know it can be done, it will be done again.

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