Jeff Bezos has personally apologized for the recent Kindle disaster when people's copies of the George Orwell classics, 1984 and Animal Farm, were remotely deleted by Amazon. Of all the books Amazon could have remotely deleted it just had to be 1984. At least one person had made notes in their digital Kindle copy of 1984 and those notes were deleted when Amazon.com made the ebooks vanish. The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog reports that one student is suing because the notes he made were deleted.
On Thursday, a Chicago-based law firm filed a suit in federal court in Seattle against Amazon on behalf of Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old Michigan high school senior. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims that when the company wirelessly deleted a copy of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from Gawronski's Kindle earlier this month, it also deleted the notes he had taken on the device for his homework.
The suit, which cites another plaintiff who also lost his copy of the Orwell classic, seeks to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles. It also seeks monetary relief for people like Gawronski who lost work from the incident.
Amazon declined comment on the suit. The company, which refunded the purchase price of Orwell books to people whose copies it deleted, has already said it would not do it again. Last week, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the incident, calling it "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles."
The law firm appears to be persuing a class action lawsuit. It's not clear if there are lots more people out there who had notes in their digital Kindle versions of Orwell's books that were erased. The case sends an important messages to companies selling digital goods. The digital future does not mean content providers can unsend things or remove things they have sold to people. This goes for digital books, games, music, apps, etc. People generally believe they own something when they purchase it - just like when they purchase a hardcover or a dvd. Content and app publishers need to take this idea of ownership very seriously.
Jeff Bezos has 
