Amazon's Perfect Mistake

Please play that lovely wrong note
Because that wrong note
Just makes me doo doo doot, doo doo doot, wah
Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, "Wrong Note Rag"

The Inverted Jenny isn't a porn movie or a yoga pose. It's a rare 1918 U.S. postage stamp characterized by an error.

Only 100 were printed with its central image -- the Curtiss JN-4 airplane -- upside-down, and today a single copy of this Holy Grail of philatelic flubs sells for more than a million dollars. During a period of childhood nerdiness, I spent countless hours searching for mistakes on stamps in the hopes of discovering the next Inverted Jenny.

But what will become of errors in the electronic age?

Amazon screwed up last month when it sold Kindle users an unlicensed version of a book. The online behemoth then compounded its goof by electronically invading customers' files to make the book -- and Amazon's mistake -- vanish into digital thin air.

That the book in question was 1984, the iconic Orwellian tale in which a "memory hole" sucks up all traces of media accounts not pleasing to Big Brother, ranks high in the "You Couldn't Make This Stuff Up" department. Kindle 1984 buyers were shocked when they woke up to find that their libraries had been raided, but it was even worse for people like Detroit teenager Justin Gawronski, who lost all his notes for a school assignment, which Amazon erased along with his copy of the book. Will "My Kindle ate my homework" become the default digital excuse for students?

Amazon apologized for its creepiness, but the Kindle technology still allows similar incursions at any time and for any reason. CEO Jeff Bezos may be a great guy, but when a customer's privacy depends on someone else's judgment calls, that's not privacy.

We've also grown accustomed to hearing no wrong notes in recorded music, where perfection is the norm and clinkers can be digitally unclinked faster than you can say "Newspeak." Now, engineers can do much more than merely correct individual played or sung tones. Inventor Peter Neubacker says his Direct Note Access software can "reach into an audio file and change any one of the six notes in a guitar chord without changing the sound of the other notes." Paging Roger McGuinn and your 12-string!

When a print publication slips up, the mistake can't be erased, but can be corrected in a future edition -- preserving both the error and, for Le Show host Harry Shearer's reading pleasure, the apology. Online publishers, though, can simply make their mistakes disappear without acknowledging they ever existed.

There's no need to cancel Kindle, of course, or to stop digital recording or refuse to read online, though one hopes that real books, analog recordings and print pubs can survive and, in some cases, even thrive alongside these technological wonders.

But let's face it -- the digital cat is out of the virtual bag, and as time goes by new technologies will provide even more opportunities for perfection. Which is a fine thing, but if we're hell-bent on wiping out any evidence of our failures, we're in danger of losing something precious -- the magic of the accident, the oddity, the surprise.

Making and acknowledging mistakes is an essential part of being human. Before inventing the light bulb, Edison is said to have told a reporter, "I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp." And just think: If Columbus had Mapquested and GPSed India, he wouldn't have bumped into the New World, and then where would we be?

Vladimir Horowitz, as great a pianist as has ever lived, said, "I must tell you I take terrible risks. Because my playing is very clear, when I make a mistake you hear it." We don't want to discourage future Horowitzes, do we?

Follow Michael Sigman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/majorsongs

Comments

[kramey]

You don't REALLY want anyone to answer the rhetorical question "where would we be if Columbus hadn't bumped into the New World"... do you?

[Michael Sigman - Huffpost Blogger]

Definitely not!

[ran6110]

OK, the Kindle mistake was stupid but there are ways around the problem. Some people read into the apology that Amazon won't do it again and others don't it's up to you...

Here is the apology.
----------­----------­----------­----------­----------­----------­----

"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"

[IDIOTA]

I want a stronger statement that includes something along the lines of once a consumer buys a Kindle, it is inviolable. What if Apple started to delete data from your Ipod?

[drkazmd65]

Actually,... as corporate 'mea culpas' go,... that's not a bad one.

A damned sight better than the more typical 'Mistakes Were Made" BS on usually sees.

How about offereing all the Kindle customers affected by this mistake a few free downloads to go with the apology?

*disclaimer,... I am not now, or am I likely to become a Kindle user so I have nothing to gain from this statement - I like the feel of a book in my hand*

[Michael Sigman - Huffpost Blogger]

Heartfelt apologies are way better than arrogant denials, but the privacy issue won't go away.

[maryec00]

i hate kindle, and i'll never buy one. why? i love books. you don't have to recharge them.

[rjmiller]

Amazon ebooks have DRM, and are therefore worthless. In a few years they'll switch to new servers or put out a new format and all of the libraries of their many customers will be erased (the same goes for iTunes users). It happened with Microsoft's PlayforSure; they cancelled the DRM service in 2008 (and the stuff wouldn't even play on their own Zune because of DRM), and it will keep happening as long as people follow this impossible idea of protecting information from the intended the user.

Remember, when you pay for products with DRM, you don't own them. You are only licensing them for as long as the company feels like allowing you to keep them.

[drkazmd65]

However,... when you buy a hardcopy book,... it never gets obsolete or erased when the server goes down.

[ChelleAgain]

The books are stored on Amazon and, if you wish, on your computer.

[IDIOTA]

What was really upsetting about the Kindle overreach was that a user's notes were destroyed. Destroying research is criminal, to me.

[ran6110]

I thought the notes were not destroyed but since they have links to specific locations they won't work with another version of the same book.

On my Kindle 2 the notes are stored as plain text and can be read with a text editor.

[IDIOTA]

That's not what I read, but if you're right, then I am less angry but still angry at the thought that my ebooks can be altered after purchase.

I was considering a buying a Kindle until this controversy.

[IDIOTA]

Yeah that Kindle episode made me angry, and I won't purchase a Kindle, but I still hand money over to Amazon. I just bought five books yesterday with the Kindle scandal on my mind, particularly because every Amazon page seems to push Kindle.

[TakeSake]

The difference between finding information online, like "1984", and finding it in book form is that I have a copy published in the 1950's. It carries with it the shadows of where it was, who read it before, and where it came from. It's the physical manifestation of the story - not a sterile PDF. It's immune to malfunctions, maintains its data, and powered by light.

However, as it happens, last night I got a machine that lets me listen in on music from many years ago. While it requires power, it doesn't use computers. Barring physical damage, the storage medium can easily maintain data for 40 or 50 years - 100 years would not be surprising. The sound is much better than anything my computer produces, and for various reasons is more pleasing than my CD player.

Data accessed and controlled remotely is too nebulous and too vulnerable to whims and treachery for everything to be deposited that way.

One of my favorite history books about World War II was written in 1939.

[superstition]

There's also a scandal about the deletion of sales ranking data for gay-themed books.

[ChelleAgain]

There was one, yeah. Basically, they felt deranking "adult" books would keep them more hidden from kids, and overzealously deranked anything with GLBT tags -- even if the books weren't graphic or really much about sexuality. Autobiographies by gay authors, for instance, got zapped.

I was upset, but get that Bezos is pretty hippy-dippy and unlikely to hate the gays and so chalk it up to pure idiocy and ineptitude somewhere rather than maliciousness. Personally, I think that if they sell it them they should rank it and expect people to pay attention -- as always -- to what their offspring are doing.

[Technowitch]

I'm not a Kindle owner, but I was on the fence about buying one. On the one hand, kind of expensive; on the other, I love and live for books.

They made my mind up for me, against buying one. As Arrodo points out, Amazon made it very clear you are not buying these books but just a temporary license for one which can (and will) be revoked at any time they see fit.

Besides the irony of this incident happening with Orwell's "1984" is another one: They may not have been licensed to sell it as an eBook, but a simple Google search shows multiple versions of it are available legally worldwide in PDF and other eBook formats. Why the discrepancy? A number of other countries have more sensible public domain rules regarding copyrighted works, including Australia.

[mbaty]

Until I know that whatever books I download cannot be deleted by the cyber masters, I will not be getting a kindle.

[Aroddo]

Amazon made a mistake and apologized for it.

But:

Amazon irrevocably showed that the Kindle is not your property: It's THEIRS.
They can apologize all they want - if for any reason amazon decides to mess with the contents of your Kindle then they can.

Amazon perfectly destroyed all trust in this new technology and replaced it with doubt. Congratulation.

[ESerafina42]

I believe that they also said in their "apology" that they wouldn't do the same thing again "under those circumstances," leaving open the possibility that they would do it again under other cirumstances, to be determined by them.

[Indra]

The event was humorous but not enough of a problem to get upset about. I can name a few hundred things people should be absolutely scared of that are happening without their permission at this very moment and that will affect their lives for ill.

[djwfutbol]

Love that Edison quote.