This is so ridiculous and sad. How could they even take away what we have already purchased. Customers should have been notified at the least. Whatever Amazon did was wrong and how would I trust Amazon anymore?. And it doesn't even matter what kind of book it was. So what do we really own when we buy digital books?
This is pretty bad, but is it possible the publisher didn't have rights to publish the book in the first place? Orwell died in 1950, which makes his work free of copyright in many (life+50) countries but not in life+70 countries like the USA. The company selling the book (mobilereference.com) appears to be hosted from Canada, where Orwell's works are in the public domain. I wonder if by some oversight or misunderstanding (or something more malicious), they were distributing the books in the United States without having the rights to.
I can't think of another reason a company would want to stop granting the licenses.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadThis is a dupe submission, a much better version lives here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=710506
I can't think of another reason a company would want to stop granting the licenses.