Kindle teen tattles on Amazon for losing his homework

A Michigan high school student will have one darned good excuse to tell his teacher when he shows up to class in a month without his summer reading homework.

Justin Gawronski, 17, was tasked with reading the dystopic George Orwell novel "1984" for his advanced-placement senior English class. As you might remember, Amazon recently reached into users' Kindle devices via the Internet after mistakenly selling the book and deleted the digital copies.

That included Gawronski's homework assignment.

He and a fellow student are suing Amazon together because when it deleted their books, the electronic notes they had taken alongside their reading also disappeared.

Gawronski said he's one of the first kids at his school to get a Kindle. He's proud to be an early technology adopter and happy with the $400 hardware. But he also told us (between household chores):

Amazon has just proven that when I buy a book on the Kindle, I don't really own it. I just feel that is wrong.

On paper, Gawronski would regularly jot down notes in the margins of his paperback books. Since getting a Kindle in June, he has been using the gadget's keyboard to quickly tap out thoughts as he reads along.

"It's a lot of brainstorming. It's nothing super concrete," Gawronski said. "I was between a quarter and halfway through [the book]. I had a good amount of notes."

The notes that he spent a couple of weeks crafting are still on his device, but the references that point to specific paragraphs and pages are gone. Instead, he gets a long string of characters as reference points -- helpful for computers but worthless for everyone else.

The lawsuit, he said, is to ensure that the digital content that we consumers buy actually belongs to us, without having to worry about the merchant taking it back.

-- Mark Milian

Photo credit: KamberEdelson