Tim Worstall

The story of the Norwegian customer who had here entire collection of books on her Kindle wiped carries on:

An Amazon Kindle user has had her account wiped and all her paid-for books deleted by Amazon without warning or explanation. She was informed by a customer relations executive that her account had been closed, all open orders had been cancelled and all her content had been removed, but has been unable to find out why.

Doctorow is quite right that what we’re talking about here is the territorial rights to a book.

The investment community is patting Walmart on the head today for booting Amazon’s line of Kindle devices out of its 10,000 stores. The Kindle, the conventional wisdom has it, is a “Trojan horse” that converts flesh-and-blood Walmart into web surfers who do their shopping via Amazon’s vast online marketplace. As FORBES contributor Tim Worstall puts it, “After all, who really wants to aid their direct competitors?”