If Only We Had Kindle Back in the Day

Amazon to pay $150,000 over Kindle eating Orwell -- and teen's homework
October 1, 2009

Amazon has agreed to pay $150,000 in a lawsuit filed by Justin Gawronski, who sued the online retailer after George Orwell's novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" were deleted from his Kindle, along with his homework. The money, after going to the law firm representing the teen, will be donated to charity. Gawronski had already been compensated for the loss -- with a $30 gift certificate.

"Amazon has just proven that when I buy a book on the Kindle, I don't really own it," the 17-year-old told The Times' Mark Milian in July. "I just feel that is wrong."

The Orwell books had been added to the online retailer's site by a company that did not have the rights to sell them. In mid-July, with no notice to customers about the error, Amazon remotely deleted the ebooks, causing widespread consternation. People who'd gone to bed in the middle of reading "1984" found, upon waking, that the book had gone missing from their devices.

Amazon showed an "uncanny knack for irony," Gawronski's lawyer Jay Edelson wrote in the complaint, in employing a "Big Brother" manner, according to Bloomburg News. Their report notes that the lawsuit was settled Sept. 25 in Seattle, where Amazon is based.

Gawronski is based in Michigan, and was adversely affected when the Amazon deletion also partially ate his homework. "It's a lot of brainstorming. It's nothing super concrete," Gawronski told The Times. "I was between a quarter and halfway through [the book]. I had a good amount of notes." Those notes survived, but they pointed only to strings of characters, where the novel's text had gone missing.

As for the other Orwell owners who lost their books, one commented on BoingBoing that he received a complete refund -- of $3.20.