Orwellian: '1984' Disappears From Kindle

How's this for irony? Not just '1984,' but 'Animal Farm' also went down the memory hole. Talk about art coming to life.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “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,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

Customers whose books were deleted indicated that MobileReference, a digital publisher, had sold them. An e-mail message to SoundTells, the company that owns MobileReference, was not immediately returned.

Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish.

An authorized digital edition of “1984” from its American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was still available on the Kindle store Friday night, but there was no such version of “Animal Farm.”

People who bought the rescinded editions of the books reacted with indignation, while acknowledging the literary ironies involved. “Of all the books to recall,” said Charles Slater, an executive with a sheet-music retailer in Philadelphia, who bought the digital edition of “1984” for 99 cents last month. “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”

Creator of Hillary 1984 Ad Identified

Carl Cameron on Fox has reported that Blue State Digital was the creator of the now infamous 1984 ad, and the founder is purportedly on the Obama campaign team. The creator has allegedly been fired.

Maybe this will put to rest the speculation by some braindead morons that the GOP was behind it.

From Wikipedia.

Blue State Digital is an Internet strategy and communications firm based in Washington, DC. The company was founded in early 2004 by four members of the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign: Clay Johnson, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, Joe Rospars, and Ben Self. They are involved in providing custom Internet applications and communications strategies to primarily Democratic organizations, political candidates and non-profit organizations.

UPDATE: Now look who we find mentioned in this Hotline report:

The most recent hire was announced this weekend: former Dean Web strategist Joe Rospars will be Obama’s new media director on the campaign. He joins his former colleagues from the Dean Internet staff Gray Brooks and Jim Brayton, who has directed Obama’s internet operation since his 2004 Senate campaign.

OK, so a founder of the group who supposedly produced the ad now works for Obama. I'd say this has his fingerprints all over it.

Let the fun begin.

UPDATE II: Naturally, Allahpundit has more.

UPDATE III: The creator resigns.

I've resigned from my employer, Blue State Digital, an internet company that provides technology to several presidential campaigns, including Richardson's, Vilsack's, and -- full disclosure -- Obama's. The company had no idea that I'd created the ad, and neither did any of our clients. But I've decided to resign anyway so as not to harm them, even by implication.

Obviously a Rove plant. Still, some nagging questions.