Earlier this week, Amazon sent out a letter to Kindle readers defending the low price of its eBooks, quoting George Orwell’s perception of paperbacks in its defense.
However, as The New York Times pointed out, the company took Orwell’s ironic comments out of context and failed to share his true point of view on the subject.
Bill Hamilton, the literary executor for the Orwell estate, responded to the story with a letter to the editor published in The New York Times. Check it out:
I’m both appalled and wryly amused that Amazon’s tactics should come straight out of Orwell’s own nightmare dystopia, “1984.” It doesn’t say much for Amazon’s regard for truth, or its powers of literary understanding. Or perhaps Amazon just doesn’t care about the authors it is selling. If that’s the case, why should we listen to a word it says about the value of books?
