Renting ebooks and Amazon

Nobody loves Amazon. Nobody that is who tries to sell things through them or who has any dealings with them that go beyond simply clicking to buy a cheap book or whatever, and with the latest revelations about amazon.co.uk’s offshore VAT dealings their customer base must be becoming rather disillusioned too.

So, a story like this on Boing Boing will do nothing to help Amazon’s reputation:

According to Martin Bekkelund, a Norwegian Amazon customer identified only as Linn had her Kindle access revoked without warning or explanation. Her account was closed, and her Kindle was remotely wiped. Bekkelund has posted a string of emails that he says were sent to Linn by the company. They are a sort of Kafkaesque dumbshow of bureaucratic non-answering, culminating in the customer service version of “Die in a fire,” to whit, “We wish you luck in locating a retailer better able to meet your needs and will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on these matters,” a comment signed by “Michael Murphy, Executive Customer Relations, Amazon.co.uk.”

The Economist has picked the story up as well and discusses the point that people do not actually own the books that they have bought.

… this lack of awareness of the legal terms-of-use is largely the fault of the e-book sellers. Their websites talk of “buying” books as if the digital transaction is exactly the same as one in a bookshop. And the explanation that customers are, in effect, merely “renting” their e-books is buried in long, jargon-filled license agreements that almost nobody reads.

What you buy from Amazon, or of course from Lavengro Books as well, is not an ebook but the right to use that ebook. It cannot be otherwise if copyright is to be protected. While there certainly are some people who photocopy whole paper books, the effort involved in doing so and the inherent loss of quality make it unattractive as an operation to perform on a large scale. But ebooks are different: any number of perfect copies of a computer file can be made with no effort at all. That is why DRM has to be used and why people who have downloaded ebooks onto their Kindle or other reader do not actually own them. Ownership implies freedom of use and disposal, which in this case is incompatible with the protection of intellectual property rights. The same applies to music that is downloaded from iTunes for example.

Naturally, I support this state of affairs. I admit that the word ‘buy’ is not ideal in this context. It is used on the Lavengro Books website, but the buttons that say ‘Buy this book’ lead to an external website, which is totally independent of Lavengro Books, which quite clearly asks the purchaser to buy the book. Perhaps with time the situation regarding the status of downloaded ebooks will become clearer and people will understand that ebooks are no more owned than is computer software and for the same reason: to prevent piracy.

But that does not in any way excuse Amazon’s disastrous customer relations. It seems – and nothing more precise can be said because Amazon has refused to explain – that this unfortunate Norwegian woman’s offence was to use the address of a friend in the UK so that she could buy books from amazon.co.uk while living in Norway, where Amazon does not have a local operation, thereby contravening the small print of the Kindle contract.

And remotely wiping her Kindle for that reason without warning or explanation is not just rude. It’s stupid.