Glenn Fleishman has a good article at TidBITS on the controversy over Amazon’s apparently Orwellian deletion of two George Orwell books from customers’ Kindles: Double Plus Ungoods: Amazon Unpublishes Orwell.

Note: it doesn’t seem to have been publicized much, but Amazon has admitted they made a mistake with this move, and promised not to do it again.

Amazon ripped two George Orwell books, their hearts still beating, from the Kindles of its customers. Reaction to the move provoked a firestorm of opinion related to ownership and permission, and Amazon swore off deleting customers’ content from the Kindle again. However, the firm also found itself in an awkward position, one that most reports seem to have ignored or glossed over.

The blast erupted from Amazon deleting two works - in a stunning bit of poetic reality, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm” - that it says a third-party Kindle content publisher lacked the rights to offer for sale. The publisher, MobileReference, sells formatted versions of public-domain works, among other titles.

Amazon certainly made the wrong move by deleting the books remotely without advance warning, taking along with them any associated bookmarks and notes. There was no question that customers purchased the books in good faith. However, the company was also certainly required to resolve a situation in which it was violating copyright.

It’s worth looking at how this situation - a somewhat unusual case - arose, along with what Amazon has previously said about the rights it gives Kindle subscribers, and what this bodes for the future.

Read the whole thing for an interesting look at the tangled web of Digital Rights Management.

Meanwhile, Amazon now has competition from Barnes & Noble, who’ve announced a new e-book store that isn’t dependent on a single device.