Amazon wants to own how you read
“No question, Amazon is the most forward-thinking company in the book business. If there’s a Steve Jobs of books, it’s Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. His vision is defining the way books will be bought and sold and written and read in the digital world — which is to say, the world. The question is whether there will be room in it for anyone besides Amazon.”
As is the case with all the major digital players — Google, Apple, Microsoft — Amazon has to be watched. Sure, you might like that you get cheap books/music/dvds/barbecue grills from them, but if they come to dominate the book market as completely as they want to, they will become a threat to you.
The longer I live, the clearer it is to me that the real threats to our freedom here in the United States are not from the government, as those on the right would have you believe, but from corporations, even ostensibly benevolent ones like Google. The more faith you put in these companies, the more eggs you place in their specific baskets, the easier it is for them to silence you, to control what you know and what you can express.
The recent events in Iran have reminded me how lucky I am to live in a country where the government doesn’t try to shut down my blog, my Twitter feed, my Facebook account. But it’s also reminded me that those freedoms aren’t to be taken for granted. I enjoy my Mac and my iPhone, my Twitter friends, my Facebook buddies, the ease of a Google search, but I’m also realizing increasingly how much control and influence these services have over me. And to be honest, it scares me.
So take a small stand for your right to free information and spread your money and your internet time around. More sources and more suppliers = more freedom.
