Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
It's hard to understand exactly what his positions are. My interpretation is that the (false) premise of Amazon owning the physical act of publishing is what gives Amazon the power to destroy culture, whilst the destruction itself is caused by Amazon's business models treating books as fungible commodities rather than sacred cultural icons. That old chestnut. Making publishing and distribution of ebooks easy and affordable for everyone "cheapens" the book. Destroys, as I think he described it, those structures built up over time. Minor point really. What I would like him to do, and I am not holding my breath, is to properly engage in a debate rather than simple preaching and repetition.
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First the usual playful antagonization - "hard to understand" is a euphemism for "hard to put into one camp or the other".
To explain my position -
I contemplate - that by increasing intellectual ownership over the entire production (the analogy is "printing the master copy") and distribution chain with .kfx - Amazon is overreaching its promoted role as a "distributer" and "manager/facilitator" on the sector.
Its intent with .kfx is not to distribute works of culture, it is to own them (even in "a new sense" if you must), and to control every (to them business related) aspect of them.
Two qualifiers - when I am talking about "ownership over the entire production and distribution chain" I am specifically talking about - the most current, mass market oriented, chain. Older chains (formats, and in niche cases distribution) they implicitly allow to coexists - but they dont engage in the promotion of those ecosystems anymore.
Books as "cultural icons" is an overemphasis on on their role in modern democracies - my point only being - that in our current societies they have to be treated as more than just commodities - where none of us should be interested in who owns the processes and how the market is increasingly formed by one entity.
If you read back on my positions in the past - I wasnt even against Amazons dominant role within the eBook sector as a whole - I saw them as being disruptive, modernizing to an extend.
I changed my position entirely - when I caught them with their hand in the proverbial chookie jar - of creating proprietary creation and distribution chains - to feed their need to control that people can read the "best version of a book" - only when they have bought it from Amazon.
And to create this model - they have taken the ability to create this book out of authors or publishers hands. Or more broadly spoken - out of societies hands.
I'm always open to a debate about those points - allthough until now - we were arguing each others standpoints ("Are you good or evil?") much more frequently. You as well, if I may say that.