Amazon's Jeff Bezos Apologizes for Removing Digital Books

From PC World: In an era when corporate CEOs are urged by consultants to quickly apologize for mistakes, Amazon.com's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has taken that advice to heart.

In an extraordinary blog posted yesterday, Bezos apologized for Amazon's handling of illegally sold copies of George Orwell's 1984 and other novels on the Amazon Kindle e-reader.

"Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles," Bezos wrote. "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."

On July 16, Amazon removed the novels from its Kindle e-book store, as well as any digital trace of the books. That meant the e-books were stricken from users' digital lockers as well as Kindle devices. Some commenters noted the irony of Amazon's pulling the novels 1984 and Animal Farm, calling the move Orwellian, referring to the totalitarian state depicted in Orwell's dystopic novels. They also used the comments as an opportunity to compare buying a physical book, which can't be taken back, to buying a digital one.

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