The funny thing about Amazon as Big Brother is George Orwell had bad bookshop memories

Perhaps the funniest thing about the accusation that online bookseller Amazon acted as a Big Brother in deleting unauthorized copies of British author George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from customers’ Kindle
e-book readers is that Orwell had bad memories of working in Booklover's Corner, a second-hand bookshop in Hampstead, England.

If you have time, read Orwell's “Bookshop Memories,” a humorous autobiographical essay that was originally published in the British magazine Fortnightly Review in November 1936. Here are the opening and closing lines of Orwell's essay:

"When I worked in a second-hand bookshop -- so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios -- the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. [...] The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.”