The Chronicler's Web (TCW)

Justin Gawronski by KamberEdelson

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

An Orwellian gaffe involving the Kindle e-book reader just won’t go down the memory hole for Amazon.com.

On Thursday, a Chicago-based law firm filed a suit in federal court in Seattle against Amazon on behalf of Justin D. Gawronski, a 17-year-old Michigan high school senior. The suit, which seeks class-action status, claims that when the company wirelessly deleted a copy of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” from Gawronski’s Kindle earlier this month, it also deleted the notes he had taken on the device for his homework.

The suit, which cites another plaintiff who also lost his copy of the Orwell classic, seeks to prevent Amazon from again deleting books from Kindles. It also seeks monetary relief for people like Gawronski who lost work from the incident.

Amazon declined comment on the suit. The company, which refunded the purchase price of Orwell books to people whose copies it deleted, has already said it would not do it again. Last week, the company’s CEO Jeff Bezos apologized for the incident, calling it “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”

Gawronski, a member of his high school’s debate team, says he got a Kindle earlier this summer because he knew he’d be reading a lot of books for his Advanced Placement English class. “If there’s something that catches my eye as I am reading, I just place a note there” using the Kindle’s keyboard, he said. Those notes are useful, he said, because “every 100 pages we have to write a 1-page summary and reflection of everything that we read,” he said.

But on July 20, when Gawronski turned on his Kindle, he watched his copy of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” disappear right before his eyes. “It was a bit ironic,” he said. (more…)