You may have heard that Amazon recently discovered that it was accidentally selling illegal copies of Orwell's novel 1984. This is easy to understand as Amazon makes it relatively easy to publish your own content in a Kindle edition.
Someone with the text to 1984 did just that, published it on the Amazon Kindle publishers toolkit.
When Amazon discovered the problem, not only did they remove it from the Kindle store, but they removed it from users Kindle devices, and refunded their money.
Kindle users were outraged.
Today, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon posted this text on the Amazon discussion forum:
"This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.
With deep apology to our customers,
Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com"
Very little spin control here. And it probably will quiet quite a few complainers.
