"The article linked by McGrath is not quite correct - Amazon did not properly check out Orwell book rights and thus had to delete them or face suit. "

How so? This is what the article said "The books – downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users – were remotely deleted after what the US company now says was a rights issue regarding the publisher"

The point is, Kindle gives them the ability to do something that no ordinary bookseller could do. They are able to remove book from your shelves without your permission. Legalised burglary.

Think of the power this kind of ability would give to a government in some future where printed paper had been replaced by the likes of Kindle, probably for newspapers and magazines as well as books.

We talk about past tyrannies as "totalitarian", but they never had anything approaching the control over their citizens that is now within reaching grasp of governments a few years down the line.