Before I let the topic of these state ebook lending bills go for a bit, there is one aspect of this story that should not be overlooked. I was thinking about it when I saw a tweet criticizing Governor Hochul’s December 30th veto of the New York version of the bill. Media professional and professor Dan Gillmor, who has over ...
In March, Senators Durbin and Cassidy introduced the INFORM Consumers Act, legislation meant to provide us with greater transparency when shopping through large online marketplaces, which is to say Amazon. In a co-authored editorial in Roll Call, the senators state: It is well documented that third parties are selling massive amounts of counterfeit, stolen and unsafe consumer products on online ...
Picking up on the piracy-doublespeak theme of my last post, let’s highlight a favorite talking point among piracy advocates and apologists, the one that goes like this: If the major producers were just smart enough to make works available conveniently and affordably, people would stop pirating. That was always a lie. And it’s been proven a lie by the filmed-entertainment ...
Last week, Cory Doctorow reported on Boing Boing that Amazon has a growing counterfeit products problem on its hands due to a change in company policy that allows Chinese suppliers to sell direct on the platform, bypassing domestic importers. If accurate, the issue itself is not very surprising. What is surprising is that Doctorow does not acknowledge—at least not in this ...
I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy. The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com. Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward ...
