Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.

What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.

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Shades of Dick Cheney! Subscription music service eMusic’s last CEO took off last fall. Chairman Danny Stein, who ran the company years ago, ran a search for a replacement and decided that the best man for the job was…Danny Stein.

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Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.

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In 2007, Steve Jobs predicted that half the music offered at his iTunes store would be sold without digital rights management–the lock-and-key system that the music labels wrap their songs–by the end of that year. Better late than never: Apple finally has deals in place with three of the big music labels to sell DRM-free songs. In exchange, Jobs will give the labels some ability to introduce “flexible pricing,” a key demand for the industry.

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Amazon has been selling digital music from all the big music labels for nearly a year now. It hasn’t changed Apple’s grip on that business in any way, and it hasn’t made any money for Amazon. But don’t write it off as a failure just yet.

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