Jason Davis of Australia’s Book Bee has an important article about the outage at Amazon’s website:
Yesterday, those who use Amazon Web Services, including our own ebooks search site www.EbookAnt.com, have noticed, um, that their Amazon ebooks catalogue was gone. For the uninitiated, AWS supplies thousands of third-party websites with Amazon product data. Sometimes. And forget about API access (the method used to remotely extract Amazon’s data from its servers). We’re working hard to get the Amazon data back.
If a giant snafu can delete Amazon web pages and data, who’s to say it couldn’t happen with customers’ books?
There’s a lot to be said for actually handing files over to people. Then the onus is on them to keep them safe, and the bonus is that they feel a sense of ownership.
In this brave new world of “licensing/renting” ebooks to customers, if you want to retain ownership of the files, you’d better not lose ’em.
The writer seems to confuse access with storage. The fact that data was inaccessible does not mean that it was lost or destroyed. While that is, of course, possible, the normal situation when there is a website outage is that access was lost through one of a number of possible causes. It doesn’t mean that Amazon deleted anything, or that that data was no longer available once access was restored.
There have been plenty of times throughout history where physical bookstores have has to close unexpectedly — floods, police action, gas leaks, etc. The fact that potential buyers did not have “access” to the physical store did not mean that the books had disappeared or that we should doubt the viability of the “bookstore” concept.
This is just another nonsensical rant by an e-book hater.
“The fact that data was inaccessible does not mean that it was lost or destroyed.”
When you’re data’s all “somewhere”, instead of right there on a machine you control, then “inaccessible” might as well be “destroyed”. If you’re depending on that data being accessible in order for your business to run, then you don’t want to depend on some bored nerd 2400 miles away being more interested in rebooting the server than he is interested in grinding his DPS Pally.
Physical books are subject to inaccessibility or destruction, too. Fire, flood, or other natural disasters can destroy a library. Events like divorce could also limit access to once owned books. Even DRM free owned ebooks, not backed up off site, can be lost forever in one fell-swoop that wipes out the physical books.
For years I resisted the ‘cloud’ model. I believed, and still believe, that users will want to have applications and at least some data directly on their devices rather than always in the cloud (we fly places and are denied radio access, travel to national parks where data services don’t exist, or stay in hotels which charge outrageous fees for Internet access). All of that said, the cloud is many times more reliable than an individual hard drive (or worse yet, a box in the garage). I’m glad my books are in the Kindle… and that Amazon keeps a friendly copy for me just in case.
Rob Preece
Publisher
“ebook hater” – that’s a good one. Have you seen my site? Anyway, first comment guy, refer to second comment guy. Cold comfort to know your book is out there somewhere, but that you just can’t access it. That’s the definition of “lost” isn’t it? Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Rob, I agree the cloud is reliable. My concern with Kindle is, like any digital device you will eventually want to replace it with a new, “better” reading device … and if that device doesn’t have an Amazon app able to load your books, you will be waving farewell to them. For that reason, I want the option to store a copy of my ebooks locally.
I doubt anyone buying MP3s from Microsoft a few years ago thought they would abandon the business. Same goes for people who bought books to read on Palm PDAs. Heck, I can’t even read the things I wrote in Word a decade ago, let alone my XYWrite files from 20 years ago.
Anyone buying books-as-apps today is definitely engaging in a short term rental arrangement, doubled up if the app relies on the cloud to serve the content.
@Bookbee: Amazon does keep my purchased books in the cloud, but as a back up. Not only can I keep them on my Kindle, but I can also back them up to my own hard drive, then to other physical media like a CD. If you ever “lose” an ebook it isn’t Amazon’s fault, they have certainly given you ample opportunity to back it up yourself. Frankly, I think Amazon could teach the iTunes store a thing or two!