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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

When some of my readers began checking their Kindle archives for books of mine they’d purchased on Amazon, they found them missing from their archives

I think Amazon (and any bookseller) should be allowed to sell or not sell any sort of book they want. However deleting already paid for books that your customers have bought from their devices is totally unethical IMO.

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Also unethical is not automatically given them a refund, and then verbally trying to humiliate them over their choice of reading when they request one.

It's really easy to imagine something like "what would your kids do if they found out what you have been reading?"

Or threathen to tell the persons' children's school. "Did you know the parent of $CHILD reads about incest?"

Just imagine it integrated with your Facebook profile...

There's this story, I don't know if it's true, of a business who used to sell gay sex toys (I don't know what is specifically 'gay' about it, let's gloss over this for the sake of the story) from the back of magazine covers. Except they didn't have any inventory or anything - their entire business was to collect payments, guaranteeing 'discrete packaging' etc in the ads; but then call the customer and tell them 'we're out of stock, but we can send you a letter with our logo on it, and when you fill in the form in that letter, we'll send you a cheque from Gay Sex Toys Inc made out to you to reimburse you'. Their business floated on people who didn't want those letters or didn't want to hand in that kind of cheques to their local banks and who just left it at that.

Credit cards are great for protecting the customer from that sort of scam.

You might have heard it from the movie Lock, Stock, and two Smoking Barrels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjj8eMNxivM

(warning: strong language)

I'd love to know if someone's actually run a scam like that at some point. Seems like a clever hack, at least it would be before the days of ubiquitous credit cards and online banking.

Ah yes, I remember seeing this movie, didn't remember it came from there. Thanks.

It's an urban legend that predates the movie; see here: http://www.snopes.com/risque/porn/porntape.asp

That's from the film Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels; http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120735/quotes?qt0344512

Not sure if it was original when included in the script or not.

They are not removing the books from devices -- they are removing them from the Kindle archives. This means it's safe if you've purchased the book, downloaded it, and left it on your device.

At least according to this: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazon-removes-incest-related...

But now if you upgrade to a newer kindle, you can't take your books with you.

Two things: 1) Amazon is not deleting the books from the devices. It is simply removing them from the web-based "Archive" of purchased books. Any books on the device remain on the device, BUT, if the book is deleted on the device, it will be lost forever. 2) Amazon is refunding purchases of these books.

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