It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,†Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else. For Bezos to have seen a bookstore as a means to world domination at the beginning of the Internet age, when there was already a crisis of confidence in the publishing world, in a country not known for its book-crazy public, was a stroke of business genius.
Do you know any “Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity?”
If so, please nominate them for the new Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced with Adversity, handed out by the American Library Association:
Th[is] award, which ALA intends to present at its Annual Conference, recognizes a librarian who “has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact.†It will be given annually to a deserving librarian…
The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. As in, they hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.
Copyright used to be a pretty specialized area of law, one that didn’t seem to affect the lives of most people. But with the proliferation of digital technologies and the Internet, a funny thing happened: copyright policy became speech policy, and it started to show up in all sorts of unexpected and unwelcome places.
It’s no longer the case that copyright is only a concern if you run the kind of company that has its own theme parks. Instead, copyright policy can have an effect on any user posting to her favorite sites, sharing videos she’s captured or photos she’s taken. It can affect your basic freedom to tinker, make, and repair your stuff.  And it gives content owners, and governments, a powerful censorship tool, with far too little oversight.
