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Originally Posted by anamardoll
The author's copyright means that they have the right to deny a place the ability to distribute their book.
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That's true but the $64,000 question is whether the re-downloading of a book you paid for from a site who had the rights at the time but no longer does counts as "distributing". IANAL so I don't know for sure.
Suppose B&N took over Dropbox - or did a deal with them - and automatically created a copy of the file in your dropbox folder when you purchased a book. Would you expect them to also delete that file when the author removed the book?
ITSM that offering a book for sale and offering to keep an online back up of a file (which happens to be an ebook) are two distinct things, legally distinguishable. So it's not automatically clear to me that allowing you to still download your B&N books is "distributing" them and to my mind it's not. But again IANAL.
However in order for these two things to be actually distinct the B&N computer systems have to support it and it sounds like at the moment the author has a big "remove" button and it deletes the book from B&N servers altogether. If so the author of course has to use that button to fulfil their agreement with Amazon.
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I'm upset at the author for revoking the book license, not Amazon or B&N.
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I can understand that and if I were an author I wouldn't sign with Select. However I'm not convinced that an author can retroactively rescind my right to a copy I've legitimately acquired.