Sherry Chandler

What? They can do that?

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

The books they deleted? 1984 and Animal Farm.

Via tinydoctor

Gin Petty, on her way to a bonsai workshop, sent this link to Amazon’s explanation:

Amazon said late Friday that it recalled two Kindle e-books because the publisher lacked the rights to the book. However, in the future, it says it won’t pull already downloaded material from customers’ devices.

The removal of two George Orwell books from the accounts of those who had already purchased them sparked an outcry from customers, bloggers, and mainstream media outlets.

“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,” Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in an e-mail. “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.”

Herdener said Amazon won’t handle things the same way in the future. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

For me, the issue remains, not whether they will do it again, but that they can do it.

Not that I’m in the market for a Kindle anyway. I spend a lot of time at the computer but when I read a book I still want it to feel, smell, and look like a book.

BTW, this site is out there, legal or not. And then there are the Orwell Diaries. And on Twitter.

Update from The Bookseller:

It is not the first time Amazon has removed titles that were offered via Kindle in breach of copyright and sold illegally through its store. Other examples include pirated copies of Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, Harry Potter books and the works of novelist Ayn Rand.

But Amazon’s actions have caused a backlash, with customers learning that when they purchase a book using Kindle they do not necessarily own it for life. One wrote on Amazon.com’s forum: “When I buy a book, I own it. Today i find that when I ‘buy’ a Kindle book, I am leasing it and it is subject to recall by the issuer.” One Kindle user even had his notes on the book removed: Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading 1984 on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he is reported to have said.

Update via

George Orwell

Orwell was living in Marakesh in 1938 when he wrote this essay:

As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women–threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.

When you walk through a town like this–two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in–when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces–besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.

And then this:

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all ound, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

He goes on to say that, in spite of all this poverty, people persisted in believing that the Jews were all rich money-lenders and the poverty was just a deception.

As Western colonial powers, our history with both Jew and Arab is shameful.

The whole essay is worth a read.

And, then there’s this from World Public Opinion , via Glenn Greenwald:

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel’s side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.

Diaries

Just occurred to me that I’m currently reading on-line blogs/diaries from a 4-century sweep of British/American history.

From the 17^th Century London, there’s Pepys’ Diary. On October 12, 1665, a Thursday when it was 48 °F in London, Pepys says:

Called up before day, and so I dressed myself and down, it being horrid cold, by water to my Lord Bruncker�s ship, who advised me to do so, and it was civilly to show me what the King had commanded about the prize-goods, to examine most severely all that had been done in the taking out any with or without order, without respect to my Lord Sandwich at all, and that he had been doing of it, and find him examining one man, and I do find that extreme ill use was made of my Lord�s order.

…

Good newes this week that there are about 600 less dead of the plague than the last. So home to bed.

One hundred and ten years later and on another continent, from the 18^th Century, Boston 1775 (not actually a diary) takes a close look at that portentous year in Boston. J. L. Bell’s entry for October 13 seeks to solve a mystery:

Among many other things, the Declaration of Independence complains that bad, bad George III has harmed his American subjects by �transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses.� The standard line is that this is a reference to the Administration of Justice Act, which Parliament passed in 1774.

However, when I looked at the wording of that law, I saw that it applied only to employees of the royal government. It said nothing about any other criminal defendants. So it wasn�t designed to deprive colonists of fair trials by moving them far from their homes. Instead, it was designed to give Crown employees fair trials by moving them away from supposedly prejudiced juries.

So where, I asked, did the �transporting us beyond seas� complaint come from?

From the 19^th Century, Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, where on October 12, 1833, Mr. Darwin was socked in by bad weather, en route from Santa Fe to Buenos Aires:

Embarked on board the Balandra; a one masted vessel of a hundred tuns; we made sail down the current. The weather continuing bad, we only went a few leagues & fastened the vessel to the trees on one of the islands. The Parana is full of islands; they are all of one character, composed of muddy sand, at present about four feet above the level of the water; in the floods they are covered. An abundance of willows & two or three other sorts of trees grow on them, & the whole is rendered a complete jungle by the variety & profusion of creeping plants. These thickets afford a safe harbour for many capinchas & tigers. The fear of these latter animals quite destroyed all pleasure in scrambling in the islands. On this day I had not proceeded a hundred yards, before finding the most indubitable & recent sign of the tiger. I was obliged to retreat; on every islands there are tracks; as in a former excursion the “rastro” of the Indians had been the constant subject of observation, so in this was the “rastro” del tigre”.

.
The jaguar is a much more dangerous animal than is generally supposed: they have killed several wood-cutters; occassionally they enter vessels.

With a note from the editors:

Jaguars were historically found from the southwestern United States to southern Argentina. Its range is now reduced. The results from WCS’s workshop, held in Mexico in 1999, indicated that jaguars have been lost from over 50% of their range since 1900. Most of the loss has occurred in Mexico and the United States in the north, and in Brazil and Argentina in the south. The largest contiguous area of jaguar range is centered in the Amazon Basin and includes adjoining areas in the Cerrado, Pantanal, and Chaco to the south and extending to the Caribbean coast in Venezuela and the Guianas. Jaguar range has decreased due to deforestation, conversion of land to other uses, and killing of jaguars and their prey.

And about a hundred years later, in the 20^th century, October 12, 1938, George Orwell had domestic concerns—how to find decent livestock in Morocco:

A lot cooler. No snow now visible on the Atlas, but perhaps obscured by clouds.

Have installed the hens & goats. Hens about the size of the Indian fowl, but of all colours, some with a species of topknot, white ones very pretty. These are supposed to be laying pullets but have not laid yet. Twelve brought crammed together in two small baskets, then sent on donkey back about 5 miles, at the end of which one fowl was dead, apparently pecked to death by others. They appear not to like maize, probably not used to it, or possibly when unbroken it is too big for them. Arabs always keep them in completely grassless runs. Tried giving them some green stuff at which they pecked not very enthusiastically. Hope they may take to it later.

Goats are tiny. Searching all over the market could not find any of decent size or with large bags, though one does see some not actually bad goats in the flocks that graze on the hillsides. The breed here is very shaggy and tends to get its coat dirty.

Orwell’s Diaries

Another new blog that might bear watching is The Orwell Prize. As with Pepys Diary, this blog will make a daily transcription from Orwell’s journals. The personal diary began on August 9, 1938; the political began on September 7.

On August 11, 1938, George Orwell wrote:

This morning all surfaces, even indoors, damp as a result of mist. A curious deposit all over my snuff-box, evidently residue of moisture acting on lacquer.

Very hot, but rain in afternoon.

Samuel Pepys, who has gotten into the plaque years, wrote this on August 10, 1665:

By and by to the office, where we sat all the morning; in great trouble to see the Bill this week rise so high, to above 4,000 in all, and of them above 3,000 of the plague. And an odd story of Alderman Bence�s stumbling at night over a dead corps in the streete, and going home and telling his wife, she at the fright, being with child, fell sicke and died of the plague. . . . Thence to the office and, after writing letters, home, to draw- over anew my will, which I had bound myself by oath to dispatch by to-morrow night; the town growing so unhealthy, that a man cannot depend upon living two days to an end. So having done something of it, I to bed.

The American Minitrue

Whether or not it means she can ever be the Democratic nominee for president, one thing I find encouraging about Hillary Clinton’s campaign is that she persists in pulling high percentages of votes despite the news media’s best efforts to stop her. Over and over, they tell us she can’t win and over and over the voters come out for her. In this one instance, for good or ill, voters seem to be thinking beyond the media narrative.

The fact is that our media has played a disgraceful role in our politics since the 2000 election.

At one time, I thought the left-wing blogs would be watchdogs against this journalism-as-infomercial but this year they have nearly all chosen to fall in behind their candidate of choice and enjoy the schadenfreude when the other guy was trashed. The candidates, too, have failed to a lesser or greater extent to call foul.

The last debate between Clinton and Obama, for example, was a travesty but either one or both of the candidates could have refused to play the game. Senator Clinton has been forced by public outcry to repudiate perceived racism from her supporters but Senator Obama has not repudiated very real sexism from his own.

The problem is, as I’ve said over and over here, when you allow this sort of thing to happen to your opponent, you cannot complain when it happens to you.

Gabor Steingart, Der Spiegel’s man in Washington D.C. can see it, if we cannot. Here is a clip from his article The Media’s Mini-Truths

The American public has not only been misled during this election campaign, but has also been fed a constant stream of irrelevant information. In one of his novels, the British writer, essayist and journalist George Orwell invented the Ministry of Truths, which he called “minitruths,” with which one would try to confuse the public with small parts of the truth that even when added up do not give the whole picture.

This is despite the fact that there is no shortage of relevant issues to discuss. The upcoming US presidential election should address issues of war, peace, and growing inequality created by the forces of globalization.

Many questions could be posed that are hard to beat in terms of drama. What would happen if the Democrats really were to withdraw the US Army from Iraq? How does Barack Obama plan to address the threat that the killing fields of Cambodia could be repeated in Basra and Baghdad? Does he have a plan or even an idea for dealing with the day after?

How do the Republicans plan to end the scandal of the uninsured? Some 47 million people in America now have no health insurance. Around 9 million have been added to that total during the seven years George W. Bush has been in power. This is the greatest market failure since the invention of modern capitalism.

But one cannot blame the journalists alone for the decline of journalism. Their importance has diminished more than in any other previous election. They now share newspaper pages and TV broadcasting time with people who call themselves strategists or consultants and who are either in the pay of a party now, or have been in the past.

Journalists and strategists deliver their commentaries, side by side and in harmony, on CNN and Fox News. Make way for Karl Rove, the architect of George W. Bush’s two electoral victories, who is now under contract with Fox News, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Raise the curtain for Dick Morris, once the closest adviser to Bill Clinton, who is a fixture on practically every TV channel. Cast the spotlight on Donna Brazile, who appears on CNN as a commentator on every election night — the audience only learns in passing that she is actually a member of the exclusive Democratic National Committee and one of her party’s superdelegates.

My thanks for FrenchDoc at Correntewire for highlighting this article. Read her fine post on the subject.

Thanks to our media, candidates are more and more likely to run content-free campaigns. Is it possible that people are voting for Clinton precisely because she is bucking this trend, her lack of money for television commercials forcing her to go directly to the people and present her policy positions? Whether her policies are wise or foolish, she has laid them out very specifically.

But I’ll admit that I am partisan.

I’m not sure what we should do about this problem. I quit watching television news long ago and I get most of my information from books and online newspapers, blogs, magazines, and streaming interview shows. This solution, though, holds a danger of creating silos and gated communities of opinion that will further splinter the country. We need a national news media we can trust, not a for-profit infotainment industry.

For now, I will comfort myself with the knowledge that not everybody believes everything Chris Matthews tells them.

Update: Digby on this subject.