Ars Technica has a thoughtful piece of this topic, see
Why Amazon went Big Brother on some Kindle e-books. Near the end it says:
Quote:
|
So why would Amazon remove the books? It appears as though Amazon's purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are "changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances."
|
I think this means that the refund of the charges for the ebook automatically triggered the ebook deletion. This makes sense when the customer requests the refund, but not necessarily when Amazon makes the refund.
The very thing that sets the Kindle apart from other ebook providers, its reliance on Amazon's servers, is also giving it at a minimum growing pains. This incident is one example, but so is the difficultly de-registering a Kindle from your existing ebooks and the lack of clarity about how many simultaneous devices each ebook can be on.