It’s the same old capitalist story. A small startup crowd-sources its content. Behemoth gobbles it up with a hefty payout to the owners of the startup … and nothing to the content creators. We saw it two years ago with AOL”s $315 million payout to Arianna Huffalot and nothing to the 6,000 plus writers who had contributed their work for free on the naïve assumption that there were ideals at play behind the scenes. Now we’re watching a replay with Amazon and Goodreads. Details haven’t been disclosed yet, but the closing will likely happen in the next quarter.
On a personal note, this news places me in a quandary.
On the one hand, I want nothing to do with Amazon. It aspires to a global monopoly, not only for books, but for the online sale of all consumer goods. It uses its market dominance to engage in anti-competitive pricing practices. It engages in aggressive tax avoidance schemes (I use the word aggressive because, for example, it has spent $5 million lobbying the California State Legislature to amend retail taxes to its benefit). It is trying to force the market to adopt its proprietary ebook formats and it locks all its eproducts with DRM. Its warehouses are sweatshops (see here).
On the other hand, I do like to write, and I do like it when people read what I write. Just yesterday I (finally) got around to signing up for the Author program at Goodreads. And then this. So what do I do now? What happens if Amazon ends up being the only game in town? Do I swallow my politics and ethics?
Idealist? Or pragmatist?
Aw, what the hell. Fuck Amazon. Download my ebooks for free.