Maybe readers allowing you to purchase electronic copies of books from giant impersonal corporations are not such a good idea after all.

What happens when Amazon decides, for reasons of its own, that you should not be in possession of a particular book? Pop! It’s gone. Eliminated by your friendly corporation’s software update system.

Big Brother came calling on Amazon customers yesterday, as the New York Times reports.

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.

In 1998, Congress (influenced by intense lobbying by copyright holders) extended the duration of copyrights for an additional 20 years, from the life of the author plus 50 years, or 75 years in cases of corporate authorship, to the author’s life plus 70 years or 95 years respectively, but Mark Helprin (a novelist) thinks copyright protection should last forever.

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

Well, if Mr. Helprin cared about the character of his own descendants, he might reflect that it could very well be better for them to live in the real world and make their own way, rather than exist as idle Trustafarians, trying to justify their futile existences via the desultory support of supposedly enlightened causes.

Egads!, no more cute screaming Japanese girls and lizards. YouTube, having been bought by Google, is going corporate, and surrendering to a collection of Japanese copyright-enforcement groups. They will be deleting 29,549 videos.

Smart move, Japanese broadcasters, you wouldn’t want any free international publicity and recognition adulterating your brands’ prestige, would you?