That Sound is George Orwell Spinning in His Grave at 4800 RPM

Amazon sold copies of 1984 and Animal Farm in E-Book format for use on its Kindle reader, and when the publisher objected, it removed the books from its store, and from the Kindles of people who had already purchased the books.

The people bought these books, and thought that they owned them, albeit without the option of donating them at a later time, etc., but they were wrong, and all traces were removed from their readers.

As both David Pogue and Boing Boing note, this mirrors a number of concerns that people have with the new IP regime, and how it will apply to digital data.

Of course, the fact that these books were consigned to the "memory hole", a term created by George Orwell in his book 1984, the irony here is obvious:

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As I am wont to say, "Who says that irony is dead?"