It appears that when you buy a book in electronic format, you are not actually buying it. Some users of Amazon’s Kindle found this out when some books they had purchased were remotely removed from their devices by Amazon.

Apparently the copyright holder notified the Amazon that the books were being been sold without its permission, so Amazon removed the two books from the accounts of users, and refunded their money.

The irony is that the books were “1984″ and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.

This has generated many humorous headlines (as well as countless tweets). Among the best were “Amazon Kindles Outrage With Ironic Removal of Orwell Titles” on the BeliefNet Blog and “Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others” from Pogue’s Posts on The New York Times Blogs.

On a more serious note, this incident highlights some of the scarier aspects of DRM (Digital Rights Management) of E-books. Apart from the fact that you cannot resell them, or lend them to someone else like a real book, now you don’t even really own them. Dennis D. McDonald has a point in “Amazon Kindle Orwell Deletion May Be Legal — But It’s Still Doubleplusungood“:
“it demonstrates how this technology can be applied and managed remotely without the owner’s involvement. Next time it will be a title embroiled in some kind of legal dispute, or a government agency will beg that a title be deleted for national security reasons.“

Replace the Refrigerator Door with a HP (Hewlett-Packard) TouchSmart IQ504 All-in-One PC. The HP IQ504 (and higher end IQ506) models replace last year’s TouchSmart Iq775. This time around HP has included a number of improvements which make it easier to imagine using it in the kitchen, serving as a replacement for a family’s organizational calendar and notes on the Refrigerator Door.

With a 22 inch touch-sensitive screen, the TouchSmart IQ504 has touch based tools like a Note Taker and Family calendar. Although the touch interface is not as sophisticated as the Apple iPhone, it allows for touch-based entry without having to resort to a keyboard and mouse. Even so, because it is an All-in-One PC, the keyboard is always close at hand.

The specs of the HP TouchSmart IQ504 are what you would expect for a Vista Desktop PC:
2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4GB RAM, a 256MB Nvidia integrated graphics chip and 500GB hard drive. The system has full 802.11n wireless networking, and both the keyboard and mouse connect to the system using Bluetooth.