Amazon on Saturday fended off accusations of Big Brother-like behaviour after it quietly erased two George Orwell books from customers' electronic book readers this week.

From last Thursday, customers on Amazon's web forums said copies of the British author's dystopian classics "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" were mysteriously wiped from their Kindle devices.

The online retailer later told CNET the books were uploaded by a publisher who did not have reproduction rights and so they were deleted.

"We removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers," spokesperson Drew Herdener said.

The move drew unfavourable comparisons to events in Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four", in which documents unfavourable to a fictional authoritarian government are dropped into a "memory hole," to be erased forever.

Herdener said the system would be changed so books would not be erased in future.

AFP

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