Amazon gets sued after Kindle fiasco

The first of what I believe may be many lawsuits against Amazon.com following its decision to delete (without notice) books from privately owned Kindle e-readers was just announced.

SEATTLE – A high school student is suing Amazon.com Inc. for deleting an e-book he purchased for the Kindle reader, saying his electronic notes were bollixed, too.

Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos has apologized to Kindle customers for remotely removing copies of the George Orwell novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" from their e-reader devices. The company did so after learning the electronic editions were pirated, and it gave buyers automatic refunds. But Amazon did it without prior notice.

It's not so much what they did as how they did it. Owners of the Kindle were not even aware it was technologically possible for Amazon.com to do this. In the case of the first plaintiff, he had been in the process of writing a report which linked to specific sections of the book deleted by Amazon.com. When the book was removed his work became useless.

Talk about destruction of demand...this would seem to have shaken the confidence of at least one Kindle owner.