Amazon has responded to today’s Kindle book deletions story in an emailed statement, explaining the publisher did not have the rights to distribute the books, but adding that they won’t handle the situation the same way if it happens again.
The statement, from Amazon’s Drew Herdener, reads:
These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books…When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers….We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.
As highlighted by the WSJ, the case draws attention to an expectation gap between real books and their digital counterparts: the latter is simply a license to read the content on your device.
