[greencat]

I might be wrong, I frequently am, but hasn't Amazon prevented unionisation amongst its employees in the past?

I liked Steven's dissection of Amazon's phrases and that rings pretty true to me.

On a personal level - Amazon have always been pretty straight up with me. Borked Kindle - I emailed and someone rang me straight away, was extremely competent and I had a new Kindle next day. Similarly as a occasional seller of secondhand stuff - always got paid. Ditto as a publisher. Unfortunately I can't point to another internet based company with the same level of service across such a range of channels. Email Google and often the query'll be lost forever. eBay/Paypal - I've actually lost a decent amount of money because of them.

Amazon certainly aren't perfect though. Secrecy is definitely one of their problems. As a publisher I found out about loaning myself by visiting a book listing. Didn't get an email from them until 8 hours later. While the geek in me loves their data driven approach - it rankles a tad that somewhere someone ran the numbers and figured it wasn't worth letting their publishers know in advance.

Their tendency to change their terms and conditions in drastic ways on the turn of a dime means I'd never rely on them as my main source of income. If you are a business owner or author depending on Amazon - you could be unemployed tomorrow with no rights or pay off. I couldn't sleep with that.

They are also part of a corporate globalisation, wealth concentration, outsourcing & automation trend which is hurting a lot of people. It's mostly small retailers and the low skilled which are affected at the moment. But Amazon et al are gradually moving up the skills ladder and I think most of us will end up poorer for it. I don't blame Amazon, in particular, for this and it's probably unavoidable but they are definitely part of it.