{"id":79,"date":"2009-07-28T16:05:43","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T21:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2009\/07\/28\/090728_amazon\/"},"modified":"2009-07-28T16:05:43","modified_gmt":"2009-07-28T21:05:43","slug":"090728_amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2009\/07\/28\/090728_amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon.com: Disrupting shared informational heritage since 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Ulin has written a thought-provoking article for the L.A. Times entitled Amazon’s troubling reach<\/a><\/i> in which he explores some of the ramifications of entrusting our “collective memory” (as expressed via books) to a commercial entity such as Amazon.com. <\/p>\n

Amazon had a recent “stumble” in which it unilaterally and without warning deleted a couple of books from its customers’ Kindle e-book readers, citing “licensing issues.” Amazon’s founder and chairman, Jeff Bezos, later apologized profusely for doing this, but the damage to the company’s credibility has been done.<\/p>\n

Perhaps that’s not a fair way to put it, though. More likely, the innocence of consumers has been punctured with respect to acquiring their books electronically, and I think that’s probably a good thing. Ulin’s article raises a number of interesting questions, but in the end, Amazon (or any other company in the same business) can exert only the control that we permit. As with any other purchase, an informed consumer is the best guard against commercial impropriety.<\/p>\n

If we’re really concerned that our “shared informational heritage” won’t be properly stewarded by Amazon, we shouldn’t be buying, er, licensing<\/i> e-books from them. That’s a decision each of us has to make on our own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A writer for the LA Times worries that Amazon.com is amassing too much control over, well, pretty much everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,9,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-writing","category-society-culture","category-technology","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}