The problem with going off half-cocked...

...is that you often end up stroking a prejudice at the expense of the facts.

I've made no secret of the circumstance that I don't like some aspects of the way Amazon is charting its approach to business with its Kindle e-book reader.

I'm not particularly thrilled about not being able to resell or donate paid-for e-books. Nor do I like the idea that some books may have limits as to how many times they can be downloaded (and that such limits are not made known to customers in advance). Neither am I a fan of Amazon's ability to change the scope of a sale (e.g., turning off text-to-speech) after the goods have been bought and paid for.

So when I read, in a piece in the NYT (with a hat-tip to LJ friend james_nicoll), that a publisher who offered works by George Orwell on the Kindle, apparently decided - oops - to change its mind, and that as a result, not only was the product withdrawn but several hundred copies that had already been sold and downloaded to customer Kindles were erased, I thought I had run into YAKHS (Yet Another Kindle Horror Story).

Alas, digging a little deeper (at Amazon's Kindle Discussion Forum) suggests things may not be so grim.

According to forum participant Thomas Palmer, "There have been quite a few cases of the publisher pulling a book from Amazon, but those have never been taken away from the consumers who bought them previously." However, when "illegal" books (pirated, for example) are discovered on Amazon, they are not only withdrawn but copies already sold are also deleted from customer devices.

Yet the explanations in the previous paragraph come, as far as I can tell, via "unofficial" channels. One voice that clearly does seem absent, from both forum discussions and customer e-mails, is that of Amazon itself. According forum participant Caffeine Queen, "I was annoyed that the email announcing the refund gave no explanation or indication that the books were being deleted. It's the same email they send if the buyer initiates a refund."

In the end, there is no "smoking gun" here, just a lot of questions. The gaggle of explanations on the Amazon forum sound plausible, but they don't come from Amazon. And while David Pogue's piece in the Times made me curious enough to find out more on my own, it nevertheless overlooked (or ignored) the plausible possibility that the deletions may not have been the publisher's idea at all, or the result of some marketer's whim, but simply Amazon implementing what it sees as a legitimate anti-pirating policy. In the end, this kind of reporting disappoints me deeply.

Cheers...

A philatelic moment...

In looking at my late mother's papers, I am chagrined at finding so many envelopes with missing stamps. Back in the day, however, the drill for young collectors involved clipping stamps from envelopes, soaking them in water, and then drying the separated and gum-free stamps between sheets of blotting paper under heavy books.

I did find one envelope, however, that escaped my notice back in the day. It was a letter from my mother's French pen pal. The stamps on it are fairly ordinary, but just for laughs, I decided to check them against the catalog.

Three of the stamps, copies of a 1932 issue with a face value of 50 centimes depicting a woman representing Peace, are indeed completely ordinary, though they are worth slightly more canceled (€0.3, according to the Yves catalog) than unused and hinged. On an envelope, the stamp is worth slightly more, about €1.

The fourth stamp, with a face value of 25 centimes, was first issued in 1927, and depicts a woman sowing. Starting around 1929, however, a variety of the stamp appeared, and this is the stamp on the envelope.

The "normal" stamp is worth €0.2 used; the variety, €27 used, and €50 on an envelope. That's a pretty impressive multiplier.

Now for the bad news: Most stamps are "actually" worth 10-20% of catalog value, so we're talking the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee. Moreover, the stamps on the envelope are not in pristine condition - they're okay, just not pristine - which drops the price by half or more, so we may not be talking even that cup. In addition, the number of collectors who specialize in envelopes (called "covers" by the cognoscenti) is pretty small, according to Feht, so finding someone who might be interested is a fairly long shot. At this point, one might as well pay for the coffee with cash.

Still, it did make my heart go pitter-pat, for just a second.

Cheers...