Readers’ privacy is under threat in the digital age

Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos launches the Kindle e-reader in 2007. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Why should companies – let alone governments – know what we are reading, asks Jo Glanville.

Every time you read a newspaper on your computer or buy an ebook, you can leave an electronic trail behind you. That trail is potentially lucrative for business, and is a new source of surveillance for government and law enforcement.

Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon and Google, can now gather an astonishingly detailed portrait of our book-reading habits: what we buy, what we browse, the amount of time we spend on a page and even the annotations we make in an ebook. As campaigners have quipped, it’s the equivalent of a bookshop hiring someone to follow you round the shop noting every book you pick up, then sitting at home with you while you read what you bought.

Defending the freedom to read is no longer only about battling against direct censorship in obscenity, blasphemy or libel cases. Since the digital revolution, it’s now increasingly about protecting the freedom of the reader as much as the reading matter.

Last year, the state of California passed a law safeguarding the privacy of readers: for the first time, the vulnerability of readers in the digital age would be recognised in statute. The Reader Privacy Act means that government agencies will have to obtain a court order before they are able to access data on customers from bookstores or online booksellers. Civil liberties and digital rights groups are hopeful that other states will adopt the legislation. The EU has also passed a law that will make it less easy for websites to track our online activities without our consent.

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The Amazon Effect

  By Steve Wasserman

From the start, Jeff Bezos wanted to “get big fast.” He was never a “small is beautiful” kind of guy. The Brobdingnagian numbers tell much of the story. In 1994, four years after the first Internet browser was created, Bezos stumbled upon a startling statistic: the Internet had been growing at the rate of 2,300 percent annually. In 1995, the year Bezos, then 31, started Amazon, just 16 million people used the Internet. A year later, the number was 36 million, a figure that would multiply at a furious rate. Today, more than 1.7 billion people, or almost one out of every four humans on the planet, are online. Bezos understood two things. One was the way the Internet made it possible to banish geography, enabling anyone with an Internet connection and a computer to browse a seemingly limitless universe of goods with a precision never previously known and then buy them directly from the comfort of their homes. The second was how the Internet allowed merchants to gather vast amounts of personal information on individual customers.

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Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit

Amazon.com's motto is displayed in its state-of-the-art West Phoenix fulfillment center. Although this 2-year-old center has air conditioning, some older Amazon warehouses did not, and workers suffered from heat-related illnesses trying to keep up with the relentless drive to boost production.

Amazon.com strives to be increasingly efficient to ship customers’ orders as quickly as possible from its fulfillment centers around the world. And while the company has a safety record better than most, some warehouse employees say the relentless drive to boost production wears them down and costs them their jobs.

By Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher

On an average day, 51-year-old Connie Milby covered more than 10 miles in her tennis shoes, walking and climbing up and down three flights of stairs to retrieve tools, toys and a vast array of other merchandise for Amazon.com shoppers.

She filled online orders for more than a decade, working through summer heat and winter chill inside the company’s south-central Kentucky warehouse.

One constant was the pace that Milby tried to keep to avoid write-ups from her supervisors that could put her $12.50-per-hour job at risk.

“At my age around here, there are not very many other opportunities to make what we make,” Milby said before beginning her 6:30 a.m. shift last October. “As long as my body holds up, I will keep working. But the way it feels, I don’t know how long that will be.”

Milby’s job here in Kentucky is a world away from Amazon’s rapidly expanding campus in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, where high-tech talent has created one of the cutting-edge companies of the Internet age.

She has been part of the massive blue-collar work force required to fulfill founder Jeff Bezos’ ambitious vision of Amazon as a company that rivals Microsoft and Apple in technological prowess, but also offers one-stop shopping worthy of a Wal-Mart.

According to Amazon, more than 15,000 of the company’s full-time employees work in its U.S. warehouses, called “fulfillment centers.” Amazon is expanding its work force at a breakneck pace to staff its global network of some 70 centers — 17 opened just last year.

In an industry that often offers scant benefits, Amazon provides full-time employees with stock shares after two years on the job, a matching 401(k) and health insurance. Temporary workers, such as those hired during the holiday rush, can buy medical coverage through staffing agencies.

Just as Amazon tracks and analyzes the habits of online shoppers, the company has created a hyper-efficient warehouse culture where worker performance is continually monitored and measured in pursuit of slashing costs and shipping times.

By the numbers, Amazon’s safety record stacks up well in an industry that has long been criticized for harsh working conditions and injuries.

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Amazon Backlash Continues to Build

By Judith Rosen

For many booksellers, tomorrow’s discounts of up to $15 for using Amazon’s price check app is the last straw. Although the app does not apply to books, it does affect bookstore sidelines like toys, music, and DVDs, and it adds to a perception that bricks-and-mortar bookstores grossly overcharge.

The app also comes on top of data that customers regularly scan books with their smart phones and then order discounted copies directly from Amazon, or even use the bookstore’s free Wi-Fi to download Kindle e-books to their devices. The latter caused Diesel Bookstore, which has stores in Oakland, Malibu, and Brentwood, to produce free Occupy Amazon buttons and coasters that picture Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wearing devil horns.

Yesterday’s open letter to Bezos from American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher was a bit more tempered. “We’re not shocked, just disappointed,” he wrote. “Despite your company’s recent pledge to be a better corporate citizen and to obey the law and collect sales tax, you created a price-check app that allows shoppers to browse Main Street stores that do collect sales tax, scan a product, ask for expertise, and walk out empty-handed in order to buy on Amazon. We suppose we should be flattered that an online sales behemoth needs a Main Street retail showroom. Forgive us if we’re not.”

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Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think

CEO of the Internet Photo: Nigel Parry; styling by Alvin Stillwell/Celestine Agency; Grooming by Erin Skipley/Ajentse

By Steven Levy

“What I’m about to show you,” Jeff Bezos says, “is the culmination of the many things we’ve been doing for 15 years.”

The CEO of Amazon.com, in regulation blue oxford shirt and jeans, is sitting in a conference room at his company’s spiffy new headquarters just north of downtown Seattle. It is mid-September, exactly one week before he will introduce a new line of Kindles to the world. He has already shown me two of them—one with a touchscreen, the other costing just $79—but that’s not what’s truly exciting him. It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers.

Bezos runs through the features that will soon set the tech world ablaze—the $199 price tag, the easy-to-hold size, the seamless access to Amazon’s rich and growing collection of digital media. When the Fire is introduced, analysts will declare it the strongest competitor yet to the iPad. Yet the Fire is not just a rival gadget, but something essentially different. The iPad is the flagship of the post-PC era—in which the desktop is replaced by lean, portable, gesture-driven tablets. As people will learn when Amazon ships it today, November 14, the Fire is an emblem of a post-web world, in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center.

While users of the iPad and the Fire will engage in many of the same activities—watching movies, reading books, playing Angry Birds—the philosophy behind the two tablets could not be more different. Apple is fundamentally a hardware company—91 percent of its revenue comes from sales of its coveted machines, compared to just 6 percent from iTunes. The iPad’s design, marketing, and product launches all emphasize the special character of the device itself, which the company views as a successor to the PC—complete with video-chat capabilities and word-processing software. Amazon, on the other hand, is a content-focused company—almost half of its revenue comes from sales of media like books, music, TV shows, and movies—and the fire-sale-priced Fire is designed to be primarily a passport to the large amount of that content that’s available digitally. The gadget comes preloaded with customers’ Amazon account information, and anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime, the company’s $79-a-year shipping service, will be able to access more than 12,000 (and counting) movies and TV shows on the Fire at no extra charge.

Indeed, Bezos doesn’t consider the Fire a mere device, preferring to call it a “media service.” While he takes pride in the Fire, he really sees it as an advanced mobile portal to Amazon’s cloud universe. That’s how Amazon has always treated the Kindle: New models simply offer improved ways of buying and reading the content. Replacing the hardware is no more complicated or emotionally involved than changing a flashlight battery.

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Congress Targets Amazon’s Silk Browser

By John P. Mello Jr.

Joe Barton (R-Texas)

Amazon’s innovative Silk web browser hasn’t left the cocoon yet, but it’s already being questioned by members of Congress concerned about online privacy.

Texas Republican Joe Barton expressed outrage about the browser at a public hearing this week, while Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey pressed  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for some answers about what his company will do with the data collected from Silk users.

“Every week…we hear some additional outrage about the abuse of the Internet,” declared Barton at a hearing Thursday on consumer attitudes toward privacy before the U.S. House subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade.

“My staff yesterday told me that one of our leading Internet companies, Amazon, is going to create their own server and their own system and they’re going to force everybody that uses Amazon to go through their server and they’re going to collect all this information on each person who does that without that person’s knowledge,” he said.. “Enough is enough.”

Barton was referring to the split browser mode in Silk that allows the software to do much of its work in Amazon’s cloud in order to improve the performance of the device it’s running on. There are pros and cons to that approach, but from the moment the technology was revealed as a component of Amazon’s upcoming tablet offering, the Fire, privacy concerns have been raised about it.

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Amazon founder heads digital advance on Guardian books power list

The most powerful man in publishing ... Jeff Bezos, founder Amazon, with a Kindle. Photograph: Mark Lennihan / AP

Jeff Bezos tops a list of the 100 most powerful people in publishing which charts the transformation of the books industry by digital technology.

By Charlotte Higgins

Seismic shifts in the publishing world, transforming the way we buy and read books, have propelled Amazon’s chief executive Jeff Bezos into the number one slot of the Guardian and Observer’s Books 100 Power List.

According to Lisa Allardice, the editor of Guardian Review, “Amazon has given readers a limitless choice of books in a way that no bookseller or publisher has ever done before. It has dealt the high-street bookshop a near-fatal battering, completely changing not only the way we buy books, but also the way we read them, as the huge success of the Kindle shows.”

The list, drawn up by the Guardian and Observer’s literary desks, reveals the decline of traditional publishing in the wake of seemingly unstoppable digital expansion. JK Rowling may be in the number two slot; but that is thanks not so much to the still-healthy sales of her Harry Potter books as to the forthcoming launch of the interactive website Pottermore – where, significantly, ebook versions of her titles will be sold exclusively.

The chief executive of Google, Larry Page, sits at number three: the company is currently locked in legal battles as it attempts to digitise and make available every book in the world. And at number 10 comes the new chief executive of Apple Inc, Tim Cook, reflecting not just the advances in devices such as the iPad, but also the new world of reading opened up by apps, such as Faber’s The Wasteland app, which includes video, readings and extensive notes as well as the text of TS Eliot’s poem.

Even so, according to Allardice, “authors – the people who change the way we think and see the world – are at the heart of the list”.

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Oz bookseller fires back in online battle

Amazon in Dymocks’ crosshairs

By Richard Chirgwin

Australian bookseller Dymocks, practically the “last man standing” as the combination of online competition, inept management and a rising currency decimates the local publishing industry, is firing back with what it calls an “end to end” online service for local authors.

Perhaps hoping that Jeff Bezos is busy looking for his missing rocket, Dymocks is prepping the service for an October launch.

Aimed at the vanity publishing market, the D Publishing: it’s a publisher with all the publishing value-add – things like book (or e-book) design, editing, cover art and so on – outsourced back to the author. However, D Publishing will assign an imprint to works and sort out their ISBN numbers.

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An Open Letter To Jeff Bezos On Terminating The Amazon Affiliate Program In California

by Danny Sullivan

 

Dear Jeff–

Thank you for your letter today, informing me that after seven years of being one of your affiliates — and having earned for you about $150,000 in that time — that you “deeply regret” unilaterally terminating my contract with Amazon to be an affiliate. I also especially appreciated the part where you reassured me that this action wouldn’t affect my ability to keep buying from your company. Nice touch.

I deeply appreciate that after so many years of supporting your company, and earning my 4.5% cut over those years (as I figured today, looking at my stats), that you’ve decided that I should be a pawn in your fight with my state. That type of loyalty really makes me want to support you in the future, should you restore your program. It also encourages me to want to continue shopping with you.

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Amazon as publisher: What does it mean?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

By Husna Haq

Ever since its inception, Amazon has brought seismic changes to the book world. Its e-commerce, mega book mall knocked traditional bricks-and-mortar booksellers off their feet. Its Kindle e-reader revolutionized the way Americans read – and buy – their books, with Amazon recently announcing it sells more e-books than print. And now, Amazon has signaled it will move into book publishing, leaving the major publishing houses holding their breath as they prepare to compete directly with the online behemoth.

Amazon recently announced that Laurence J. Kirshbaum, a literary agent and former publisher, will return to publishing to lead a new imprint for Amazon.

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