Let me preface this post with the caveat that should be obvious, but may not be to those not familiar with my editorial history: I’m not anti-business, and I don’t see conspiracy in every shadow.

I do, however, take extreme exception to the actions of Amazon this weekend, and particular exception to Andrew Keen’s interpretation of the deeper meaning of Amazon’s decision to pull George Orwell’s 1984 and and Animal Farm from the devices of folks who had purchased the books legitimately from the Kindle store.

Here’s the kicker of Keen’s position (emphasis added):

Was the American blogosphere correct? Is Amazon, as a leading player in the burgeoning web services industry, an example of Fascism 2.0? And is Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s billionaire founder and CEO, a clean-shaven version of Josef Stalin?

[…T]he allusion to Big Brother over this incident is the kind of metaphorically flabby thinking that George Orwell abhorred. The whole point of Nineteen Eighty Four is that there is only one Big Brother. The totalitarian regime, which banned all forms of self expression, is the non-negotiable reality at the heart of Orwell’s dystopia. Thus Winston Smith, the last thinking man in Oceania, had no choice. He had to live under the omnipotent gaze of Big Brother. There was no escape, no alternative to the monopoly of power held by Orwell’s singular police state.

But Amazon’s Kindle is anything but non-negotiable. Nobody – not Jeff Bezos or Big Brother – is forcing anybody to either buy the Kindle device or subscribe to the Amazon e-book service. The innocent victims of the bizarre Kindle switch could go out and use their refunded $9.99 to buy the physical book at their local bookstore. At worst, then, this peculiar scandal is no more than a minor inconvenience that neither limits what books we read nor how we read them.

It’s clearly not an oppressive government responsible for taking away our books, and it probably would have been a bit more ironic if the book in question was Fahrenheit 451, but there are still shades of oppression here, if you have at least a passing understanding of how the eReader market is shaping up.

When you frame it in the sense that in the Kindle, what we’re looking at is the future of the book and magazine industry, it suddenly becomes a much more serious matter.  As of the time of this post, the Kindle is the only commercially viable product that’s successfully connecting readers with books.  Clearly it’s a bit overpriced and there are a great number of issues (DRM being a major problem) with the service, but it’s the most viable thus far.

It’s only a matter of time until the Kindle or something like it replaces all forms of print media.  A stat I’ve trotted out several times is that it’s cheaper for most magazines and newspapers to buy each of their subscribers a Kindle in exchange for long term subscription contracts.

If the Kindle, therefore, is the epitome of what the future of print is, then should we not be upset and cry foul when the arbiter of an industry decides what can and can’t be kept … arbitrarily?

To their credit, Amazon has come out and said that this will never happen again, but can we guarantee it?  DRM, which is what Amazon’s business model rests in, has been proven over and over again to always be a losing proposition for consumers. When I buy a copy of 1984 at the bookstore, I can reasonably expect to keep that copy of the book in perpetuity.

Simply because because a publisher can track who does and doesn’t have a copy of their book doesn’t give them the moral right to do so and repossess it at a whim.

Tech bloggers are right to call foul on this, and should do so at the top of their lungs. I don’t buy the argument that because it isn’t the government doing the censorship that it isn’t censorship.  Censorship comes in many forms, and when you’re pretending to be the digital equivalent of a brick and mortar bookstore, you had better behave like one or face the public relations repercussions.