Kindle Actions Explain Popularity of Piracy

While the major publishers, studios and labels bitch and moan about how piracy is destroying their business they continue to make decisions that only reinforce the reason people resort to piracy in the first place – and no, it’s not all about price.

Take this for example:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.      LINK

Now, Amazon has backtracked slightly, claiming these titles had been released without proper authorization but that doesn’t change the underlying issue.  In the good ol’ Industrial Age, if you went to a store and bought a book and took that book home than that book was yours forever.  No matter what some publisher decides later, nobody could come into your home and take back that book without being charged for theft, even if they left a few bucks on the shelf.

In a similar manner, when I acquire a song or film or ebook via a file-sharing service and I download that file to my iPhone or laptop, that file is mine and, without a fair amount of hacking, nobody can take that file away from me.  I can move it around, copy it and even share it with other friends because it is mine.

With a Kindle, the fact is your never OWN anything.  All you really are buying is an extremely limited license to read the book on your Kindle unless Amazon decides otherwise.  This is not the same thing as buying a book.

Unless the major content distributors of the world figure out the difference they will continue to lose to the gray market that allows people to truly own their content.

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