Although it's not available in the UK yet, there's still been plenty of publicity about the Kindle over the last 24 hours. 2 titles were removed from customer's Kindles by Amazon, with no explanation as to why and no warning that it was going to happen.
The fact that the books in question were George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm suggests that someone's sense of humour needs a little work.
The vaguries of digital preservation are a common conversation in the library world, and I am very far from an expert. What I do know is that increasingly, academic institutions are being encouraged to go 'e-only', at least for science journals. But there is the long-term to consider, and for many places, the issues are far from clear-cut. If you buy a journal, you have bought the journal, the journal sits on your library shelf and it is yours forever. Usually, you buy access to an e-journal, and that is quite a different beast. What happens if you cancel your subscription? Do you lose access to the material that you bought? Did you really 'buy' it at all?
This can be solved by buying 'back files', which you then store yourself, on your own servers. Which means that having paid for them, you then have to pay again to look after them, but that's nothing new. Shelving costs money, just the same as servers.
What is striking about the Amazon case is the lack of warning. Libraries are bound to be twitchy about the idea that a provider can simply remove access to material because they change their minds. In this case, it was due to breach of copyright - those books should never have been sold in the first place - but that's this time. The demonstration of the power that Amazon has over the Kindles, even once the customer has bought the content, is making ordinary consumers realise what libraries have known for quite a while. Digital copyright is complicated and still in its infancy. The music industry could have told them that.
