A friendly warning: Don’t be too quick to get rid of all those DVDs and Blu-rays [View all]

[Shampoobra]

(Before I start, please understand that I don’t consider this a “problem” compared to actual problems such as poverty, sickness, the death of a loved one, a friend’s betrayal, and so on. I learned a long time ago to keep little annoyances such as this one in their proper perspective. This is simply a friendly warning to anyone who might be about to make the same mistake I made.)

I’m afraid to add up how much I’ve spent on Amazon Instant Video movies and TV shows since I bought my Kindle Fire HD. It’s definitely more than “hundreds,” but I’m not sure if I can claim to have spent “thousands.”

Adding up the total cost would make me sick, given what I just discovered, so I won’t add it up. But it’s a lot.

When I purchased season 9 of The Office on Amazon Instant Video last June, the season finale (which was also the series finale) was 52 minutes long. (It was 52 minutes long when I watched it on NBC the night it originally aired, and it was 52 minutes long when I purchased and downloaded it on Amazon Instant Video.)

Over the past four months, I’ve been slowly re-watching the season on my Kindle. Last night, I began watching the season finale again.

It was 44 minutes long. Amazon had shortened content I already “owned.”

This left me wondering why I had fallen under the assumption that physical media was somehow inferior to digital media. I have never had a DVD or Blu-ray suddenly and inexplicably become shorter in length after I watched it and put it on my shelf.

My first clue was when Dwight failed to refer to PBS as “the propaganda wing of Bill and Melinda Gates - and (addressing the camera) viewers like you” in the first minutes of the episode. It was a great line, given Dwight’s authoritarian personality. (I can’t help but wonder what was behind the decision to censor that particular line.)

But at first I just assumed my memory was failing. I knew Dwight’s PBS/Gates comment was there, because when I bought the season in June, I plugged my Kindle into my TV and watched the finale with a friend. (This was just a short time after NBC originally aired the episode.) We talked about the PBS/Gates comment at the time.

So last night, I thought at first that Dwight’s PBS/Gates comment must have been somewhere other than in the first few minutes of the episode. Then I checked the length of the episode, and that’s when I got a shock that made me lose faith in digital downloads.

At some point since I watched the finale last June, Amazon has cut eight minutes from the episode.

I called customer service, and they refunded the original purchase price. That was really nice of them (normally, a customer has up to seven days to return digital content), but I can’t see any reason to ever buy another Kindle book, movie, TV show, game, or app.

I bought the content on the assumption that it was safe on Amazon’s servers, because why would they want to lose a compulsive spender like myself? But lose me they did. There’s just no reason to keep buying content that can be altered/shortened when my back is turned.

And since I’ve gotten used to the extra space where my physical media used to be (before I donated hundreds of books and movies to charity) ... well, I guess I’m done buying those, as well.