Proprietary reading: Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices. On Friday, Amazon.com remotely deleted purchased copies of George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 from customers' Kindle readers in the wake of a copyright dispute.

The irony of Amazon as Big Brother aside, Amazon's BlogKindle last month promoted the yanked titles with this photo of the author: George Orwell, Good Kindle Books at a Glance #12.

From the Times,

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer's home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

"It illustrates how few rights you have when you buy an e-book from Amazon," said Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer for British Telecom and an expert on computer security and commerce. "As a Kindle owner, I'm frustrated. I can't lend people books and I can't sell books that I've already read, and now it turns out that I can't even count on still having my books tomorrow."

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading "1984" on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. "They didn't just take a book back, they stole my work," he said.

You can read the complete works of George Orwell online at george-orwell.org.

Update: Peter Kafka at All Things D quotes Amazon's response (Amazon Rethinks its George Orwell Removal Policy),

These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books. When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.

...and finds it lacking:

If Amazon wanted to appease customers worried that digital media they buy from the company might disappear, unannounced, it could do so, very easily. It could just say: "We won't be taking away stuff we sell you ever again. You buy it, you own it. Doesn't matter if it's a book, a CD, or a collection of bytes."

Because, as I noted before, that's basically what the Kindle license already says: Amazon says it grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content". It doesn't seem to add any caveats that I can see.

I'm hoping Amazon's language here is just an awkward bit of PRspeak, and not a lawyerly way of reserving rights to pull stuff off Kindles sometime down the road. But I've asked, and will let you know if I hear back.

Back to the land again: Meet the city dwellers going back to the land "Working the land is as hard today as it has ever been. So why does a new generation of disaffected urban professionals want to get back to nature? Five converts tell their stories" in the Independent (UK).

The first commenters dismiss the five dropouts profiled in thumbnail sketches bacause, as one wrote, "all these stories have been made possible by having a big pile of cash." One of those profiled chimes in with,

...am sorry to deliver a controversial opinion, but Emma and I (the ones pictured outside the log shed) didn't have a large pile of cash...we just worked hard in ordinary jobs...me in IT and Emma in insurance.

Test, treat, but heal:'The Cause of My Life': Inside the fight for universal health care. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's plea in Newsweek to "end the disgrace of America as the only major industrialized nation in the world that doesn't guarantee health care for all of its people."

The senator ends by making reference to his brain cancer:

I am resolved to see to it this year that we create a system to ensure that someday, when there is a cure for the disease I now have, no American who needs it will be denied it.

This story was written with Robert Shrum, Senator Kennedy's friend and longtime speechwriter.

The primacy of food: I Was a Baby Bulimic by N.Y. Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. This is just alarming from a professional eater.