Hachette Job

“Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.

     The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks. [...]
     Generally, most popular books are available from Amazon within two days. [...]
     'We have been asked legitimate questions about why many of our books are at present marked out of stock with relatively long estimated shipping times on the Amazon website, in contrast to immediate availability on other websites and in stores,' said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette spokeswoman. 'We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly.'
     But, she added, 'Amazon is holding minimal stock' and restocking some of Hachette’s books 'slowly, causing "available 2-4 weeks" messages.'
     For at least a decade, Amazon has not been shy about throwing its weight around with publishers, demanding bigger discounts and more time to pay its bills. When a publisher balked, it would withdraw the house’s titles from its recommendation algorithms.
     ‘Typically, it was about 30 days before they’d come back and say, “Ouch, how do we make this work?”’ an Amazon buyer told the journalist Brad Stone in his book about the company, The Everything Store.”
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times
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rising from the grave

From: GravestonesLiverpool

“Stop carving that gravestone. Brick-and-mortar bookstores aren’t dead, yet. On the contrary, independently owned bookstores are growing in number. According to the American Booksellers Association, since hitting a nadir in 2009, the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has grown 19.3 percent, from 1,651 to 1,971. The current total is less than half the 1990s peak of around 4,000. But it still serves as a rebuke to the conventional wisdom that equates Amazon’s relentless rise with the inevitable death of the physical bookstore.

     What explains this renaissance? The collapse of Borders in 2011 is one big piece of the puzzle. (Removing a dominant carnivore from the savannah gives all the other animals a little more breathing room.) The end of the recession also contributed to a more nurturing economic environment.
     But there’s more to the story. There is increasing evidence that the same digital transformation that has so dramatically reshaped the publishing industry, and driven millions of consumers online, also paradoxically rewards locally rooted authenticity. Our digital tools are steering us toward brick-and-mortar stores that promise a more satisfactory consumer experience than either chain stores or online emporiums can provide.”
— Andrew Leonard, Salon
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sold down the river

“‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ wrote W. H. Auden, tipping his hat to the biographer’s art while lamenting its utter inadequacy. Jeff Bezos, whose total conquest of e-commerce has made him one of the most famous people on the planet, has until now evaded any serious biographer. There have been shilling lives in the strictest sense, from the cut-and-paste job of Richard L. Brandt’s One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com to the YA hagiography of Josepha Sherman’s Jeff Bezos: King of Amazon.com (“From the time he was a toddler, Bezos was busy trying to change his world. He felt he was too old to sleep in a ‘baby’ crib, so he found a screwdriver and took the crib apart!”).
     But Bezos has tightly controlled the flow of information about himself and his company. What readers have encountered is the same small fund of recycled anecdotes, most of them focusing on his childhood (brilliant nerd, inveterate tinkerer, ardent Trekkie) and the creation myth of Amazon itself, complete with the now obligatory reference to the role played by the founder’s suburban garage.
     Now, nearly twenty years after Bezos sold his first book online — for the record, it was Douglas Hofstadter’s appropriately brilliant and nerdy consideration of artificial intelligence Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies — a skilled, stubborn biographer has finally caught up with him.”
— James Marcus, Harper’s Magazine
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they want it both ways...

"[...] Amazon and others are 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' by removing too much of the self-published erotic content and complains that Amazon in particular is not giving authors sufficient explanation as to why their ebooks are being taken down. Another post at International Business Times reports on how readers of such content are up in arms, too, signing a petition to have content reinstated at their favourite ebook retailers. (Kobo seems to be at the centre of this scandal and has recently released a letter explaining its position and what it’s doing about it.)

     Each of these retailers have policies on what kind of content authors can publish and sell with them. [...] Barnes & Noble says in its content guidelines that it may remove any book that 'graphically portrays sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal.'
     Amazon’s policy is similar: 'We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts. What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.'
     That would mean Fifty Shades of Grey, last year’s mega-best-seller (and the fastest selling book of all time), could be removed, which begs the question, who gets to decide what is and is not sold in bookstores?"
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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Independent Bookstores: as American as French Fries

James Joyce in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, 1938
(from: Gisele Freund)

"Everywhere in the world may look more and more like everywhere else, but there are still a few proudly Gallic institutions that you can count on spotting in any city or town in France: cafés that thrive in spite of Starbucks, bakeries with their total indifference to things gluten-free, tabacs that keep hanging on as smokers turn to e-cigarettes.

     Most pleasing of all, in this age of Amazon, are the independent bookstores—around two thousand five hundred of them, all told. Paris alone has nearly seven hundred, one for every three thousand citizens, though the ratio of bookstores to readers often feels closer to one to one. If you can’t find the Colette novel you’re looking for on Rue de Reuilly, you just go two blocks over to the Rue de Charonne, or to Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where bookstores share the street with Algerian tea shops and furniture makers that predate the Revolution.
     This isn’t a university neighborhood with an intellectual pedigree. It’s just the way things are there—pretty different from here. In a recent study of the American cities with the most bookstores, and the most per capita, New York didn’t make the top ten in either category. To a New Yorker who spent her formative years witnessing the routing of independent bookstores by Barnes & Noble, and then the gutting of Barnes & Noble by Amazon, the situation in Paris is luxurious beyond belief."
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
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Frankfurt Book Fair 2013

From: JourneyMart

"The Frankfurt International Book Fair, in October every year and stands out to be the largest and the most significant in the literary world. The book fair is a meeting place for publishers, authors, distributors and multimedia companies to discuss the publishing rights and licensing fees. The exhibition takes place in a multi hall with over 2, 99,000 guests from 90 countries."

— JourneyMart
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"Organisers of the world's biggest book fair in Germany warned Tuesday against the domination of Internet giants as the publishing world grapples to blend old and new forms of reading.
     Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, urged the need to maintain diversity in what people read and publish, adding that Amazon, Apple and Google were 'logistics magicians but are not publishers.'
     'There's no passion there,' he told reporters, ahead of the fair's official inauguration later Tuesday before it opens its doors Wednesday.
     He warned that to maintain diversity, technical standards, such as payment systems that influence the way people read and access content, should be designed to serve customers. 'Technical standards are tools. They must be designed to serve people and their needs, not the other way around.' He said companies such as Apple and Amazon were 'machines for customer retention.'
     But he stressed that international publishing was not 'paralysed with fear' and was fighting back with innovations, while smaller, independent book shops are also developing new ways to entice customers."
— Phys.org News
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Hollowing out the middle class one book at a time…

From: etsy

"Publishers Weekly, the publishing industry trade magazine, quotes [U.S. President Barack] Obama deputy press secretary Amy Brundage on the appearance [at the Amazon warehouse]: 'The Amazon facility in Chattanooga is a perfect example of the company that is investing in American workers and creating good, high-wage jobs,' she said Friday. 'What the president wants to do is to highlight Amazon and the Chattanooga facility as an example of a company that is spurring job growth and keeping our country competitive.'

     American Booksellers Association's [Chief Executive Oren] Teicher protests that, writing, 'At a time when Main Street retailers, including indie bookstores, show promise of recovering from the recession, we are disheartened to see Amazon touted as a "jobs creator" and its warehouse facility used as a backdrop for an important jobs speech, when, frankly, the exact opposite is true.'
     Citing the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Teicher writes, 'Every $10 million in spending that shifts from Main Street retailers to Amazon results in a net loss of 33 retail jobs. That would mean for 2012 alone — using Amazon’s own numbers about its increase in sales — Amazon cost the U.S. economy more than 42,000 jobs just last year!'"
— Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
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Steamboat Willie Up The Amazon

From: krazymind

"Facing the loss of their exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other cartoon stars, Walt Disney Co. executives led a successful lobbying campaign to secure an extra 20 years of protection for their U.S. copyrights.

     Congress passed the legislation, now awaiting President Clinton's signature, to extend the copyrights that otherwise would have expired beginning in 2003.
     Disney Chairman Michael Eisner took his concerns directly to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). The company's political action committee also contributed to key lawmakers.
     'We strongly indicated our support for the measure,' said Ken Green, a spokesman for Disney, whose copyright on Mickey Mouse was scheduled to expire in 2003, on Pluto in 2005, on Goofy in 2007 and on Donald Duck in 2009.
     Richard Taylor, a Motion Picture Association of America spokesman, said Disney worked very hard on the issue. MPAA also used its heavyweight lobbyist President Jack Valenti, who called on his decades-old contacts with legislators.
     The change in the law allows corporations to have exclusive rights for a total of 95 years, instead of 75 years. For individuals, such as authors and songwriters, it extends copyrights to a total of 70 years after death, up from 50 years."
— Opposing Copyright Extension
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"When Congress passed the first Copyright Act in 1790, copyright protection lasted for 14 years, and authors could apply for a single 14-year extension. After a book’s copyright term expired, the work would fall into the public domain and become available for anyone to reproduce it.
     But Congress has repeatedly extended copyright terms. Today, new works are protected by copyright for the life of the author plus 70 years, and some works are still under copyright 90 years after they were published. Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic spotted some research by Paul Heald at the University of Illinois law school that illustrates how the longer terms of modern copyright have affected the availability of older books.
     Heald examined a random sample of new (e.g. in-print) books on Amazon and plotted their distribution. His results were surprising.…
     Why the dramatic drop-off in the number of titles being published after the 1920s? Works published before 1923 are known to be in the public domain, giving publishers the right to republish them without asking anyone’s permission."
— Timothy B. Lee, Washington Post
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"Disney is famous for getting copyright-term legislation passed that extends protection on old materials and thus protects their interest in Mickey Mouse, their iconic character. One of the first appearances (Wikipedia claims it's the third appearance) of this character is in the cartoon short Steamboat Willy. This short has been at the center of much of the debate around copyright on the character.
     Recent work suggests that, in fact, the character in Steamboat Willie is not copyrighted any longer. If that's so, Mickey Mouse as he's presently constructed is probably a too-close derivative work to be claimed under separate copyright and thus the mouse may be out."
— Alan Wexelblat, Copyfight
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Into The Deep

From: Book Porn

In a few years all the United States Government has to do to ban books (new books, at least) is shut down Amazon... which, from recent disclosures about the NSA's arrogation of the "interwebs," wouldn't be very difficult.

"Yesterday Amazon.com quietly began discounting many bestselling hardcover titles between 50% and 65%, levels we've never seen in the history of Amazon or in the bricks-and-mortar price wars of the past.

     The books are from a range of major publishers and include, for example, Inferno by Dan Brown, which has a list price of $29.95 but is available on Amazon for $11.65, a 61% discount; And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, listed for $28.95, offered at $12.04, a 58% discount; Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, listed at $24.95, available for $9.09, a 64% discount; and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, listed at $17.99, available for $6.55, 64% off. A notable exception is The Cuckoo's Calling by J.K. Rowling, using the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, which is discounted 42%….
     Some have speculated that Amazon is also emboldened to engage in dramatic price cutting—which hurts traditional bricks-and-mortar stores and feeds consumer perception that a fair book price is lower than its cost—by the Justice Department's victory against five major publishers in the e-book agency model case as well as Wall Street's acceptance of continued losses by Amazon for now in the expectation of retail domination—and major profits—eventually."
— Shelf Awareness
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Buy books at your local, independent bookstore (like this one). Please.

relics

From: fuckyeahcraft

"Then a Barnes & Noble 'superstore' came to town. It anchored a mini-mall with a large parking lot. The bookseller already had a cloudy reputation; I knew that its steep discounts on best-sellers were putting pressure on smaller bookstores near its locations. The retailer was then making its big expansion push. Soon after the opening, I drove over to check it out. Look, Starbucks coffee! A magazine rack filled with alien titles such as Zyzzyva, Utne Reader, and Foreign Affairs. A 'Cultural Studies' section. An entire shelf full of Faulkner. Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field."
— Michael Agger, The New Yorker
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"Publishers, fearful that selling to libraries will hurt sales to the general public, have thrown up roadblocks. Some major publishers jack up the price libraries pay for e-books compared to what they charge the public. Others make only a small number of titles available, delay their availability until weeks after the general release, or require libraries to buy another copy after lending it 26 times. Such policies actually mark an improvement over the recent past. Until earlier this year, some major publishers refused to sell to libraries at all.
     Public awareness that libraries lend e-books will play a key role in whether Amazon's digital book business erodes, Barclays said. As it is, relatively few people know about borrowing digital books, although their numbers are growing. A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 31% of the public was aware that libraries lend e-books, up from 24% in 2011. Only 5% of people actually had checked out a digital book compared with 3% in the prior year, Pew found. 'E-books are becoming more important, and we do expect them to grow going forward,' said Christopher Platt, director of the joint technology team for the New York and Brooklyn public libraries. 'Digital is not a boutique service. It's part of the future of the library.'"
— Verne Kopytoff, CNN Money
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Amazon (rainforest)

Brazilian rainforest (from: The Guardian)

"According to survey research by the Codex Group, roughly 60 percent of book sales — print and digital — now occur online. But buyers first discover their books online only about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6 percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the titles they end up adding to the cart on Amazon? In many cases, at bookstores.
     The brick and mortar outlets that Amazon is imperiling play a huge role in driving book sales and fostering literary culture. Although beaten by the Internet in unit sales, physical stores outpace virtual ones by 3-to-1 in introducing books to buyers. Bookshelves sell books. In a trend that is driving the owner of your neighborhood independent to drink, customers are engaging in 'showrooming,' browsing in shops and then buying from Amazon to get a discount. This phenomenon is gradually suffocating stores to death. If you like having a bookseller nearby, think carefully before doing this. Never mind the ethics of showrooming — it’s self-defeating. You’re killing off a local business you like. (If you prefer e-reading, many independent stores have agreements with Kobo and Zola Books that give them a cut of e-book sales.)…
     By defeating its competitors, Amazon is choking off some of its own air supply. Barnes & Noble and independents are in one sense competitors for Amazon, but in another sense they are functioning as unwilling showrooms and sales agents for the online giant. As David Carr has suggested, Amazon should want them to survive, if only out of self-interest."
— Evan Hughes, Salon
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The Three R's: Readin', Writin' & Retribution

From: Made In China

"Closing arguments for the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Apple concluded last week, although U.S. District Judge Denise Cote is not expected to reach a decision for another couple of months. If you’ve found the case difficult to follow, you’re not alone. Still it’s worth getting a handle on the basics because the suit — or, more precisely, the business deals behind it — have changed book publishing in significant ways. Furthermore, Judge Cote’s decision could have impact well beyond the book industry.

     Apple was charged with colluding with publishers to fix e-book prices. At the root of the dispute lie two different ways that publishers can sell books to retailers.
     First, there’s the wholesale model, the way that book publishers have sold printed books to bookstores and other outlets for years. The publisher sets a cover price for a book, sells it to a retailer at a discount (typically 50 percent) and then the retailer can sell the book to consumers for whatever price it chooses.
     The other method of selling books is via the agency model, which means, essentially, on commission. The retailer offers the book to consumers at a price the publisher sets and gets a percentage of whatever sales are made. It’s rare for print books to be sold in this way, but it’s the method Apple uses to sell content like music and apps in its iTunes store."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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War of Words

From: LikeCool

"As new, pirated ebooks of Stephen King's print-only new novel Joyland begin to circulate online, researchers in Germany are investigating a new piracy prevention method which could alter a story's text to deter illegal copying. Joyland, the coming-of-age story of a college student who works at a fun fair where a murder has been committed, was released earlier this month through small press Hard Case Crime. King said last year that he 'loved the paperbacks I grew up with as a kid, and for that reason, we're going to hold off on e-publishing this one for the time being,' a move which attracted predictable criticism from readers online, who have given the well-reviewed novel one-star write-ups on Amazon.com without having read it. And despite King's wishes to focus on the paperback, pirated ebook copies are already available online….
     At Germany's Fraunhofer Institut, meanwhile, researchers are looking into new protection measures for ebooks. The new ebook digital rights management (DRM) system would, reported PaidContent, change certain words in the text of a pirated ebook – 'invisible' could become 'not visible,' for example, and 'unhealthy' become 'not healthy' – so that an individualized copy could be traced."
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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platform-agnostic... have faith

From: alsacréations

"While readers have enthusiastically embraced digital publishing, the book industry itself has continually dragged its heels. Even those who’ve embraced digital review platforms like NetGalley have been reluctant to make similar leaps for retail sales of digital books, and their reticence has limited consumer access to digital titles, particularly backlist–the same books consumers have the most difficulty finding in print. Add in the fact that many day-and-date releases cost nearly as much as their physical counterparts, and the e-market, while substantial, seems unlikely to take the place of print anytime soon….
     On some levels, their reluctance is pragmatic. The technology of digital publishing is awkward and inconsistent. The closest thing to a single file standard, e-pub, is still far from platform-agnostic and notorious for destroying formatting elements, which limits what writers and designers can do structurally if they’re planning for digital….

     Real progress on the digital front would require companies like Apple and Amazon to collaborate to create a consistent format – and for now, they won’t, thanks to a combination of paranoia and proprietary and competitive concerns."
— Rachel Edidin, Wired
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Why do e-book outfits love the letter 'K'? (Part 2)

Photo: Selina Swayne (from: word and image)

"An Australian bookseller has announced that he will no longer stand 'passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices,' and is urging readers to throw their Kindles in a specially provided bin.

     Pages and Pages, one of Australia's leading independent booksellers, made the announcement on Friday that it would be holding a 'Kindle Amnesty' on the third Saturday of every month, when customers would be able to get rid of their old Kindles in a bin in the Mosman Village, Sydney store in exchange for a A$50 (£34) gift voucher if they also buy the ereader the store sells.
     'Pages & Pages is no longer sitting passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices. Through this campaign we want people to understand what Amazon is doing and make an informed choice to have choice,' said manager and Australian Booksellers Association president Jon Page.
     'The ebook is not a threat to physical bookshops. This new format presents bookshops and readers with many wonderful opportunities to sell and read more books. What does threaten bookshops is a company who engages in uncompetitive behaviour, pays no tax in Australia and misleads readers with restrictive devices and fake book reviews.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"If print could talk, it would surely be telling the world, Mark Twain-style, that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. The market for e-books grew exponentially after Amazon introduced the Kindle, and it’s still one of the most fascinating and unpredictable sectors of a once hidebound industry.
     But the early-adapter boom is showing signs of flagging and the growth of the e-book market appears to be leveling out. E-books are definitely here to stay, but it seems that many, many readers — a threefold majority, in fact — still prefer print.
     […] New self-publishing enterprises are a godsend for traditional publishers because they can take much of the uncertainty out of signing a new author. By the time a self-published author has made a success of his or her book, all the hard stuff is done, not just writing the manuscript but editing and the all-important marketing. Instead of investing their money in unknown authors, then collaborating to make their books better and find them an audience, publishers can swoop in and pluck the juiciest fruits at the moment of maximum ripeness. As Hughes points out, that’s exactly what happened with erotica blockbuster E.L. James."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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"Last October, when superstorm Sandy ripped through Connecticut, it flooded Bank Square Books in Mystic. Owner Annie Philbrick recalls walking inside to the smell of the ocean and a soaking wet carpet. […]
     Not to worry. Three weeks after superstorm Sandy, on Nov. 16 at 11 a.m., Bank Square Books reopened for business. 'We couldn't have done it without the help of our community,' says Philbrick. 'It was pretty incredible.'[…]
     That community support is by no means unique to Bank Square Books, and it may be the secret ingredient behind a quiet resurgence of independent bookstores, which were supposed to go the way of the stone tablet – done in first by the national chains, then Amazon, and then e-books.
     A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.
     While beloved bookstores still close down every year, sales at independent bookstores overall are rising, established independents are expanding, and new ones are popping up from Brooklyn to Big Stone Gap, Va. Bookstore owners credit the modest increases to everything from the shuttering of Borders to the rise of the 'buy local' movement to a get-'er-done outlook among the indies that would shame Larry the Cable Guy. If they have to sell cheesecake or run a summer camp to survive, add it to the to-do list.

Wendy Welch and her husband
(from: Malaprop's Bookstore Café)

    '2012 was the year of the bookstore,' says Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. In her memoir, she recounts how she and her husband, Jack Beck, created – sometimes despite themselves – a successful used-book store in a town that, by any business measure, is too small to support one."

— Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
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Dented Cars and Bad Teeth

"This past summer, my novel, Broken Piano for President, shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me!
   My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different 50 Shades of Grey and Gone Girl. It was selling more copies than Hunger Games and Bossypants. So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.

     But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.
     Even when there’s money in writing, there’s not much money."
— Patrick Wensink, Salon
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Buy his book here... please.

Endangered Speeches

From: Zeably

With more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages 'endangered and at risk of extinction,' an army of tiny publishers is fighting an unsung battle to save them. UK press Diglot Books is one of them, and this week took on the might of Amazon to get its Cornish children's story out to readers. […]

     Director [of Diglot Books] Alison O'Dornan said it did so "on the basis that our title was actually bilingual and that the Cornish translation had been checked by an examiner for the Cornish Language Board, and also that the alphabet was the same as English so there were no extra characters needed". When this had no effect, she turned to social media for support.

     'The great news is that Amazon has indeed backed down after the support that we have generated, and have now agreed to publish the Cornish title,' said O'Dornan, who hailed it as a testament to the power of social media in 'allowing a minnow such as ourselves to change the minds of a big company.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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It's a jungle out there: Part 2

From: Wikimedia Commons via Great Writers Inspire

"On Thursday, Otis Chandler, the CEO of Goodreads, cheerily posted, 'Today I’m really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads. We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them.'
     Many of the 16 million Goodreads users probably thought of different analogies than 'joining the family.' How about 'being swallowed by an anaconda after being squeezed to death'? Or my initial response on Twitter: '"Joins" Ha. Ha. Good one. Like Poland "joined" The Third Reich.'
     [...] In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce.'"
— Rob Spillman, Salon
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"And isn't it ironic…" — Alanis Morissette

"Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

    Germany’s ARD television channel made the allegations in a documentary about Amazon’s treatment of more than 5,000 temporary staff from across Europe to work at its German packing and distribution centres.
     The film showed omnipresent guards from a company named HESS Security wearing black uniforms, boots and with military haircuts. They were employed to keep order at hostels and budget hotels where foreign workers stayed. 'Many of the workers are afraid,' the programme-makers said.
     The documentary provided photographic evidence showing that guards regularly searched the bedrooms and kitchens of foreign staff. 'They tell us they are the police here,' a Spanish woman complained. Workers were allegedly frisked to check they had not walked away with breakfast rolls."
— Tony Paterson, The Independent
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"As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.
     The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics 'people skills.' These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects. Morgan hopes that by having soldiers practice their newly acquired techniques on 'someone they can’t necessarily identify with' (read: someone who is not white), they’ll be better prepared to do ‘the real thing’ abroad.
     What’s the problem here? We see several.
     First, intelligence does not exist in a vacuum. It is gathered to support a particular foreign policy agenda, the morality of which is not beyond question.
     It seems evident that Yale would not train foreign military operatives to interrogate informants. Yale as an institution does not — cannot — align itself blindly with the goals of other militaries.
     But who is to say we should align ourselves with U.S. foreign policy? Though its goals are at times morally defensible, they can also be appalling. The techniques soldiers learn at Yale might be used, for example, to identify candidates for President Obama’s 'kill list,' which is itself unethical and likely illegal. If someone lies to protect their friend from ending up on that kill list, is that a lie it is moral to detect? By training soldiers to perform these interrogations, Yale would be complicit in achieving these goals."
— Natalie Batraville and Alex Lew, Yale Daily News
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And if you still want them, don't buy them here...

Write-By-Numbers

From: Above & Beyond

"In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them. For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. [...]
     Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features [Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books] says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series. [...]
     Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. 'The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with,' says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 'We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it.'"
—Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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