1984

As the flame of this debacle grows dim, I find myself still bothered by the misrepresentation and poor fact checking done by fellow bloggers and reporters. Case in point… A lot of people are trying to link this unfortunate episode to DRM. While I oppose DRM, and think that Amazon has squandered what little possible benefit DRM offers the consumer, this is quite clearly not at DRM issue. Digital Rights Management is concerned with access control, and specifically with limiting the ability of the consumer to copy and transmit copyrighted materials. Most people dislike DRM (possibly without know much about it) and therefore bloggers and the media have co-opted the term in hopes of raising our hackles. I post this short afterthought in hopes of settling your DRM hackles back down, at least on this count.

This week Amazon pulled a surprisingly ironic move. It removed an unauthorized version of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal farm from all connected Kindles. Its important to note that these books were uploaded to the Kindle Store by a company that did not own the rights. Regardless, the move angered and frighted Kindle many users. There are countless newspaper articles, blog posts and tweets on the irony, legality and fairness of this move, so I won’t say more about that here. What I will do is provide a solution to this problem. I’m not using (or supporting) Windows anymore, so this solution will only work for you if have a Mac or Linux box. ...