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Rehearsal for Amazon probe? Justice Department investigating Google Book Settlement
April 28, 2009 | 8:16 pm
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By David Rothman
Tweet-related links here (via BookSquare). NYT story here. Let’s hope that Amazon is next in Justice’s sights. Please!
No, I’m not saying Amazon is guilty of anti-trust violations. But enough strange things are happening for Jeff and friends to be begging for a fond look by the feds, whether Justice or the FTC. I mean, why can’t Kindle books show up reliably in the iPhone’s Safari browser when you use Amazon’s search engine? Why the false “unavailables”? Another example of Amazon tilting the table to favor the Kindle over Apple alternatives?
Meanwhile as a writer I’m thrilled that Justice is checking out the Google settlement.
Disclosure/Reminder: For retirement investment purposes, I’m a very small Google shareholder, but I try to call ‘em as I see ‘em.
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Comments:
I’m glad to see the DOJ looking into the Google Book Settlement not because I have any anti-trust concerns. Rather, I was curious as to what legal standing the Author’s Guild really has to basically “speak” for the gazillions of books that exist that really have no direct business relation to the Author’s Guild membership.
How can this agreement between Google and the AG really apply to ALL the books Google has scanned into their system?
As far as your ongoing feelings of Amazon conspiracies let me share something that just happened to me a few minutes ago.
I just ordered the Kindle version of Mark Helprin’s new book “Digital Barbarism”. The book arrived a couple of minutes later and I opened it up and started reading. After reading a few paragraphs it seemed to me that this just didn’t feel like the right book so I opened up the cover page and sure enough there was a cover for a different book. Though the title of the book I was sent and opened said it was “Digital Barbarism” by Mark Helprin there is a glitch in their database and what was actually sent was a book by Logan and Noah Miller titled “Either You’re In or You’re In The Way”.
Oooops. I alerted amazon to the problem and I am sure they will fix it soon.
The point is that humans enter all the data into Amazon’s system and mistakes will happen.
Of course I could be wrong and there is actual evil intentional manipulation behind these sort of mishaps
Hey, HG, I agree that people make mistakes. But Amazon sure tends to make convenient ones for its shareholders
I’ve of course noted, again and again, that I have found no definite proof–just some very interesting weirdness worthy of investigation. Thanks. David