B12 Solipsism

Amazon has said it is purchasing Zappos for over $800,000,000. Why so high?

Pete Blackshaw of AdAge speculates:

Zappos is a game changer, and it found value — and ferocious word-of-mouth and brand advocacy — in a place most of us leave for dead and certainly don’t consider even close to being a media channel: customer service. They took this “cost center” input and turned it into an unassailable asset, fortified by the founder-CEO’s sometimes “cult-like” (arguably irrational, by the typical marketing book) obsession with serving the consumer at all costs. It wasn’t flaky. He approached this with focus, discipline, real incentives and an obsession over a “different” set of numbers.

Zappos did this at a critical juncture for all of us. We know word-of-mouth matters. We suspect “advocacy” might be the metric that truly moves the needle. Even separate from the Amazon deal, Zappos probably did more to shape our collective mind-set around the importance of “paid” vs. “earned” media, and it titled us much toward the later.

[Click to continue reading Is Customer Service a Media Channel? Ask Zappos - Advertising Age - CMO Strategy]

At least for now, Zappos will still be an autonomous subsidiary, remain headquartered in Las Vegas, and maintain its same executive leadership.

I’ve been a long-time customer of both corporations for a long time, and if any of Zappos culture rubs off on Amazon, Amazon will be well served. Amazon is a fine company, but they are a faceless corporate behemoth, a Wal-Mart of the internet, selling a little bit of everything. Zappos on the other hand still feels like it is run by somebody who personally cares for its customers, a sort of mom-and-pop corner store that knows everybody on a first name basis. The kind of place that gives little Johnny candy when he goes by. Poor metaphor, bottom line, Zappos customer service is just spectacularly friendly in all interactions we have had with them.

Amazon, on the other hand, occasionally is bit Orwellian. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who upon hearing the news of the acquisition immediately twittered:so will Amazon steal into my house at night and reclaim shoes I’ve bought from Zappos.

I do hope Zappos maintains what it is that makes it Zappos.

“Amazon Kindle Leather Cover (fits 2nd Generation Kindle)” (Amazon.com)

Sounds like an April Fools joke, but it isn’t.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

…

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

[Click to continue reading Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com]

This is a really really compelling reason to avoid purchasing a Kindle, no?

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. “When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,” he said.

[Click to continue reading Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices - NYTimes.com]

I don’t see how this can be covered in PR pixie-dust. Amazon is going to be the butt of a lot of jokes for a long time. Sneaking in and deleting 1984 of all books? Seems like there could have been a less obnoxious way to handle this, perhaps a note to those Kindle owners who had downloaded 1984? a coupon? Something, not just zapped down the memory hole…

We almost bought a Kindle a few months ago, thinking it might be a way to subscribe to periodicals without all the paper waste, no longer would we consider it. Annotating articles is a work-product, and Amazon could just remove it without asking.

Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a “permanent copy of the applicable digital content.”

Retailers of physical goods cannot, of course, force their way into a customer’s home to take back a purchase, no matter how bootlegged it turns out to be. Yet Amazon appears to maintain a unique tether to the digital content it sells for the Kindle.

Justin Gawronski, a 17-year-old from the Detroit area, was reading “1984” on his Kindle for a summer assignment and lost all his notes and annotations when the file vanished. “They didn’t just take a book back, they stole my work,” he said.

Amazon hasn’t changed the wording of their terms of service, yet

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

[Click to continue reading Amazon.com: Help > Digital Products Help > Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device > Amazon Kindle Terms, Warranties, & Notices > License Agreement and Terms of Use]

The New York Times allowing one of its staff to advocate stealing images from Flickr is one thing, but Chris Anderson wants to expand upon that equation.

“Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Chris Anderson)

Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker reviews Chris Anderson’s new tome to the mantra, information is going to be free, bitches, so relax and enjoy it.

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

Had James Moroney read Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99), Amazon’s offer might not have seemed quite so surprising. Anderson is the editor of Wired and the author of the 2006 best-seller “The Long Tail,” and “Free” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” To musicians who believe that their music is being pirated, Anderson is blunt. They should stop complaining, and capitalize on the added exposure that piracy provides by making money through touring, merchandise sales, and “yes, the sale of some of [their] music to people who still want CDs or prefer to buy their music online.” To the Dallas Morning News, he would say the same thing. Newspapers need to accept that content is never again going to be worth what they want it to be worth, and reinvent their business. “Out of the bloodbath will come a new role for professional journalists,” he predicts, and he goes on:

There may be more of them, not fewer, as the ability to participate in journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. But they may be paid far less, and for many it won’t be a full time job at all. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation. Meanwhile, others may use their skills to teach and organize amateurs to do a better job covering their own communities, becoming more editor/coach than writer. If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation.

[Click to continue reading Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker]

[After the Revolution is Over]

So is it true? Are paid content creators going to be the 21st century version of hansom cab drivers? I’m still not convinced. If I have the choice, I’d rather pay The New Yorker for a subscription to their magazine¹ so they can pay writers like Malcolm Gladwell instead of paying nothing and reading hacks like the writers of B12 Partners Solipsism on my kindle-like device. I would not assert there are zero non-hack writers who write for free, but if one made a list of all the blog writers who do their own original reporting without relying on the resources of paid journalists and journalistic institutions, the list would be surprisingly short. Especially since billmon retired.

[Ballad of the West Loop - Kodachrome version]

Malcolm Gladwell is skeptical as well:

Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Keep reading

1. as I have done for nearly 2 decades [↩]

Hey, Illinois legislators, don’t do this, ok?

Cash-strapped states trying to force retailers to collect taxes on online sales are spurring efforts by Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. to avoid being swept under the proposed laws.

North Carolina is close to passing a law that would force online retailers to collect the state’s 4.5% sales tax from marketing affiliates, people who get a sales commission from online customer referrals. Amazon, of Seattle, Wash., told its North Carolina marketing affiliates on Wednesday that it would stop doing business with them by July 1 if the law takes effect. Cutting the affiliates would enable Amazon to avoid collecting tax on sales in the state.

“We believe the way North Carolina is going about collecting the sales tax is unconstitutional,” said Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. “It isn’t appropriate for us to have to comply with an unconstitutional burden.”

[Click to continue reading Amazon Threatens Cuts Over State Taxes - WSJ.com]

I don’t make much money on Amazon affiliate linkages, but I make enough to pay for my hosting fees, and would be quite saddened if that revenue stream dried up. North Carolina ought to stop subsidizing tobacco farmers if they are so concerned with their budget.

A few interesting links collected May 6th through May 7th:

• Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game – Waxy.org – “Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane’s session seems sometimes to loose the beat.”

  FAIL!!

  Umm, for one, “lose the beat” instead of “loose the beat”. And for second, bhwah-ha-ha-ha, Kenny G!!

• 

• MenuPages Blog :: Chicago: The Green City Market Is Open! Celebrate at Bonsoiree – “The Green City Market opens for outdoor business today! ”

  photo by me

• BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter – “Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone’s boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else’s equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good.
  Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.”