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Critics are describing as “Orwellian” a decision by bookseller Amazon.com to remotely access Kindle e-book readers and delete copies of books the company wasn’t licensed to sell, including George Orwell’s own Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Orwellian label is particularly apt, given that the dystopian classic centres on a nightmarish future in which warring ‘superstates’ such as Australia and the United States have varying rules on the release of copyright material into the public domain.
In a particularly chilling scene, outer-party member Winston Smith purchases dissident leader Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism only to have the Ministry of Truth delete it from his Kindle. Winston is then taken to the dreaded Room 101, where he receives a full refund.
Amazon’s decision was slammed by Kindle owners as “Fascism 2.0” in a reference to the way authoritarian regimes in the 1930s burned the PDF versions of subversive literature.
Many suspect Amazon of harbouring a secret ambition to restrict the availability of books. If this is the book giant’s aim, the company may need to adopt some other strategy than making millions of titles available for purchase worldwide.
The Amazon Kindle represents the single biggest threat to the availability of the written word since the printing press.
