In the swarm of controversy around Amazon’s book-deletion, Amazon managed to mostly finish cleaning things up with their customers. One thread left unresolved, however, had been the the lawsuit. A student began a suit against Amazon when the deletion of 1984 and Animal Farm from his Kindle resulted in losing the notes for his homework. The suit has now been settled and Amazon owes $150,000.
This amount obviously won’t hurt Amazon. The company probably avoided the pursuit of a larger, class-action settlement by preemptively offering $30 refunds to everyone effected. The amount is what was settled on as appropriate for the plaintiff’s specific damages.
My favorite part about this story has to be the plans of the law firm. This kind of litigation has a reputation of being simple money-grabbing, but that’s not the case here. The lawyers seemed to be involved simply because they didn’t agree with the actions Amazon took. As such, they are donating all of their earnings from this suit to charity. They launched the suit jut to tell Amazon something, and I think that they were successful.
Alright, I’m going to be “that guy”. They are offering refunds to everyone AFFECTED (not effected).
Here is a sentence for you: The effect of refunding everyone was that all of the affected customers were made happy.
Well, I will never again be able to use the whispernet on my Kindle 2 because I want to keep my Orwell with notes and highlights. I’m afraid to turn it on because I’m afraid my book will get repo’d. Amazon’s Orwell shenanigans rendered my whispernet a non-feature. I’m still mad. I didn’t get the $30 offer, either. I’m waiting to read the B&N Nook reviews when that rolls out…might switch to them, after I have confidence that they won’t repo books.