Student sues Amazon after Kindle eats his homework

It seems we have yet another reason to volley complaints in Amazon's directions. 17-year old high school student Justin Gawronski had apparently been taking electronic notes and annotations on his Kindle for a summer assignment on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yeah, you can probably guess where this is going -- after the retailer remotely pulled the plug on that particular version of the book, Gawronski's notes were lost in the ethers, rendered useless. The suit, which is seeking class action status, asks that Amazon be legally blocked from improperly accessing users' Kindles in the future and punitive damages for those affected by the deletion -- and if he asks nice, we're pretty sure Jeff would write his teacher a note. [Warning: read link is a PDF]

[Via Trading Markets]

[Ovy Posted Jul 31st 2009 1:22PM]

This is why I will always use real books.

Also, 1984 ain't exactly a difficult read. I doubt those notes were worth anything. A high school summer assignment ain't exactly a thesis.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 31st 2009 5:12PM]

This is another example of why we need tort reform.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 31st 2009 5:14PM]

You lawsuit happy people are short-sighted and in the end, it is YOU who will pay for this kid's frivolous lawsuit. If you don't understand that, then realize that for every dollar won in a case like this, multiple dollars are going to come out of your pockets to pay for it in the form of higher prices on future purchases, or higher taxes or both. Even if he doesn't win, you will pay for the expenses Amazon incurs and the court costs. So yes, keep enthusiastically encouraging and supporting this kind of thing and watch as more of your future income continues to go to the life-sucking lawyers that run just about every aspect of this country. This is not what the founding fathers had in mind.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 31st 2009 11:56PM]

This is not as frivolous as other lawsuits. This is effectively a pricing mistake. Why can't Amazon just replace the "bootleg" copy of this book with a legit copy? It may be more than $0.99, but the legit copy is only $9 more. So it costs anything from $0 to $9 / book for Amazon to do this, and am sure they can even pass part or all of these costs to the erring publisher. If they inform people nicely, some will just opt for a refund, so they don't have to pay the difference. I am sure if Amazon just bit the bullet, they would've lost less (mostly in the form of lost sales due to this negative publicity).

I am for tort reform. But I am also aware of bait-and-switch tactics that some laws are trying to prevent. If an online vendor explains to me that the $15 brand-new monitor was a pricing mistake, and they cancel that order before it's being shipped out, it's no big deal to me. Just make sure they inform me properly and give me the correct credit and order adjustment options for no extra charge. However, if I already started using the newly bought purchase, the vendor better ask nicely or just accept their mistake. What if I already gave away or sold my old monitor? Vendors better not expect that it is their customers who have to suffer for their mistakes. Despite what lawyers might tell you that it's about this piece of contract or what not, maybe it does help to just at least do it with people's consent. Why do these big companies think they have to pull the rug from under people's feet? How difficult is it to ask people to step aside before taking away the rug?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 1st 2009 5:38PM]

I have an idea to share re: homework. On back-to-school night last year, I made a deal with their parents: I said, "I won't assign grammar or essay homework, if you will supervise your child's reading-discussion homework." Every parent made positive comments about this approach to homework. Few parents at the intermediate, middle, or high school levels want to or know how to supervise written work. Supervising their child's reading is something that parents support and perceive as valuable.

Here, in a nutshell is the homework plan: Students read for thirty minutes, four times per week. Parents grade a three-minute discussion of each reading session. Students lead this discussion with reading comprehension strategy discussion prompts. I got a high degree of buy-in from parents and students. I flesh out this homework program much more on my blog at Homework That Makes Sense

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 5th 2009 10:27PM]

If I trust the kid's statement, it sounded like he just put annotations without any highlights: BAD IDEA. Annotations only apply to a particular location, i.e. a word. You won't even know later on which exact passage the comment applied to and have to read a page or two before and after to figure that out.

If he had good note-taking habit, highlighting the section and then adding a comment at the end or beginning, he wouldn't have a problem. Highlight is already in the My Clippings.txt, and unless you had 1000s of such annotations, it's relatively simple matter to search for the highlight, where the text is in the new book, and add the annotation back (or simply edit My Clippings.txt with the new location).

I wouldn't say that the kid has no case whatsoever (after all, why would Amazon apologize if what it did was completely justified and right?), but he has a very weak case. Amazon didn't delete the notes, and even the location thing is very easy to fix if you aren't stupid: find the new location for one of the annotations in a new book, which should give you a "calibration factor" between the location in the old book and the new book (remember: locations are linear, it's not a random number assigned to a line in the book). Apply that factor to every single note (he does know how to edit plaintext files on a computer, right?), and voila, your old notes are in the new book, in the approximately right locations.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 21st 2009 1:13AM]

@captain obvious: The wiping out of notes and bookmarks happens, for example, when you download a book via USB, and then later you're in Whispernet range and Amazon makes a wireless download attempt, not knowing that you already have the book loaded. So there are cases where stuff is wiped out. I can believe it happened in this case. The notetaking function is not really that reliable for other reasons besides this, so I wouldn't recommend it. I use the notes file for making backup bookmarks so I won't loose my place if the Kindle gets confused from my moving around in the book.