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.

Ed Driscoll visits Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth and explores how history can be turned on a dime.

7:25 video

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Producing his Complete George Orwell led Peter Davison to endure seventeen years of labor, seven changes of publisher ownership, and (ultimately) a sextuple heart bypass. The (apparent) completion of this Herculean project in 1998 was received with universal accaim, but Davison did not stop.

His original editor, Tom Rosenthal, recalls:

After my departure Secker & Warburg changed ownership no less than four times, and when the redoubtable Davison turned up with the newly discovered and remarkable material now published as The Lost Orwell he was told that Secker would not be able to publish it because it would not sell enough copies.

David Pryce-Jones positively explodes with indignation.

For many years now, Peter Davison has been the editor of a Collected Orwell, put out by Secker and Warburg. After Volume 20 he thought the series was complete. Then he discovered more material, including letters from Eileen, Orwell’s first wife, and Sonia, as well as some Orwell essays he had overlooked. Most fascinating of all are lists of Communists and fellow travellers whom he knew, and on whom he commented sharply for the benefit of a counter-intelligence department. Here’s a window into the Cold War.

This latest volume was published by the Timewell Press, boutique publishers not long in operation. How had this conceivably come about? I got the Timewell telephone number and the man who answered was Andreas Campomar. He’s now in the position Fred Warburg was in all those years ago, but this time because Secker & Warburg had turned the book down on grounds of cost. They’ve made millions out of Orwell, and they do this?

Reviewers in the London Times and Telegraph found this post-ultimate volume “invaluable” and “fascinating.”