"This is incorrect. Figurative book burning is an explicit design goal of the Kindle. Without it, Amazon would have a very difficult time getting major publishers to put their works on the Kindle. Even if your statement was correct, design intentions are irrelevant; the fact that the capability is there is what matters."

Authors wouldn't need to resort to this if mass e-book piracy didn't exist.

"You're also making the faulty assumption that deletion is the only option. Modification is far more dangerous. Did you know that the average Chinese citizen older than 40 has no idea how heavily their search results are being censored? Picture a Grandma sitting in her living room in China with her Kindle. She's reading Animal Farm. Her copy is sufficiently doctored that she thinks it is a novel about farm animals, not a work criticizing the corruption that results from a communist revolution. After she's done Grandma will go to sleep feeling happy, enlightened, and unoppressed by her government, blissfully unaware that she's been duped. Sounds far fetched? If you had asked me in the early 1930s whether a German political party would be able to convince a large portion of the German population that an Aryan race was desirable, I would have said it was far fetched too."

Don't blame Amazon for something the government has been doing for many years. I don't think a grandmother in China would even want to read an anti-communist novel, considering the consequences. China is a scary place.

"Not if using encryption or circumventing DRM is illegal. If DRM achieves sufficient market penetration, you wont be able to go about your daily life without it. You barely can as it is."

You cry about DRM yet you offer no solution for copyright holders to protect their works. DRM is the direct result of the slow attack of the current copyright system through large amounts of people online that not only have no problem copying copyrighted materials, but feel it is their right.