From the Associated Press:

A pirated e-book of 1984 led to an Orwellian moment for Kindle customers.

Users of Amazon.com’s e-reader device were surprised and unsettled over the past day to receive notice that George Orwell works they had purchased, including 1984 and Animal Farm, had been removed from their Kindle and their money refunded.

Amazon is claiming they made the move because of copyright issues surrounding the pirated editions, but they would, wouldn’t they…

It’s possible that, were Orwell not the author in question, this story wouldn’t add up to much, but reports are coming in of Kindle users creating virtual barricades around their e-copies of Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, with cries of “They will pry our dystopian novels out of our cold, dead hands!”