I have a few subscriptions to bulk products on Amazon that ship every 2-6 months or so and yesterday was the drop date for my 3 pack of Clorox Disinfecting Wipes. My dog food in the same order should arrive on Tuesday, but the wipes aren’t estimated to arrive until April 27-29. Apparently the coronavirus scare has too many people stockpiling. Ugh.
Tag: Amazon
So when I went to Amazon this morning I learned that decent, reasonably priced webcams are nearly as hard to find as toilet paper
— Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) March 16, 2020
Andy Hunter, the cofounder of Electric Literature and Literary Hub, launches Bookshop, an e-commerce platform that promises indie bookstores a way to take back sales from Amazon.
The Post has pulled off theneat trick of combining prestige journalism with a shadow clickbait factory that puts out a steady flow of fast-turnaround, aggregated stories grasping at virality.
Bookmarked on January 23, 2020 at 07:04PM
👓 Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It’s Complicated | Dan Cohen
Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)In this issue, I want to open a conversation about a technology of our age that hasn’t quite worked out the way we all had hoped—and by we, I mean those of us who care about the composition and transmission of ideas, which I believe includes everyone on this list. Twenty years ago, literary critic Sven Birkerts reviewed the new technology of ebooks and e-readers for the short-lived internet magazine Feed. They sent him a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook, and he duly turned them on and settled into his comfy chair. What followed, however, was anything but comfy:
René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)
My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I’m curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?
November 06, 2019 at 08:49PM
We are beginning a renovation of our main library at Northeastern University, Snell Library, and have been talking with architects (some of them very well-known), and I’ve found the discussions utterly invigorating. I would like to find some way to blog or newsletter about the process we will go through over the next few years, and to think aloud about the (re)design and (future) function of the library. I’m not sure if that should occur in this space or elsewhere, although the thought of launching another outlet fills me with dread. Let me know if this topic would interest you, and if I should include it here.
Dan, this is definitely interesting. Please include it here or on your main site!!!
November 06, 2019 at 08:43PM
But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (< $1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).
Nice to see this laid out. I’ve never seen a general overview of how this system works for libraries.
I’ve always wondered what it cost my local public library to loan me an e-book whether I read it or not.
November 06, 2019 at 08:40PM
It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.
For me, and potentially for a majority of others, our memories have evolved to be highly location specific. It’s far easier for me to remember what I’ve read when I read a physical book. I can often picture what I was reading at the top, middle, or bottom of the left or right page. This fact in addition to how far I am in the book gives me a better idea of where I am with respect to a text.
These ideas are very subtle and so heavily ingrained in us that they’re not very apparent to many, if at all.
See also Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture by Lynne Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
November 06, 2019 at 08:32PM
🎧 @hypervisible | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green
Gettin’ Air with @hypervisible Professor of English at Macomb Community College. Self described as the “The Beavis of Twitter”, we chat about how he works to raise awareness of the absurd and abusive tech practices of various platforms and companies and how he helps his students navigate this increasingly dystopian world. “There’s always material to talk about how something sucks if you’re in the ed-tech space”.
The description far undersells the great conversation here. I almost wish it had been recorded just after Halloween so we might have gotten some discussion about Ring Doorbells recording millions of children and then promoting that scary fact in their marketing and social media.
Somehow @hypervisible blocked me on Twitter, which is a painful shame–at least for me. He’s one of the few researchers to have done so and one of the few people it’s worth having a separate account just for reading his content. I’m glad that others like Terry help to get his message out in other ways!
Chris also mentions a great list of recommended reads at 11:30 into the episode including:
- The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale
- Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Noble
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
- Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts
- Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
👓 In which I almost waste four dollars at Amazon | quomodocumque
Instructive anecdote. I needed a somewhat expensive book and the UW library didn’t have it. So I decided to buy it. Had the Amazon order queued up and ready to go, $45 with free shipping, then had a pang of guilt about the destruction of the publishing industry and decided it was worth paying a li...
👓 Maxwell House Brings You Midge’s Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Haggadah | Amazon
Midge's limited edition Haggadah is free with any purchase of participating Maxwell House Coffee products.
I’ve seen some old Haggadahs like this in the past from Maxwell House, but this is an awesome crossover promotion with Passover coming up.
👓 Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa | Bloomberg
A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.
🎧 The Daily: How New York Lost Amazon | New York Times
Lawmakers who opposed the company’s deal are calling its collapse a political victory, but some say this messaging may come back to haunt them.
👓 ‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism | John Naughton | The Guardian
John Naughton (the Guardian)Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions
If you can’t read Zuboff’s new book in full, this article/interview may convince you that you should anyway. It may be one of the most important things you read all year.
🎧 Triangulation 380 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | TWiT.TV
Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She talks with Leo Laporte about how social media is being used to influence people.
Links
Even for the people who are steeped in some of the ideas of surveillance capitalism, ad tech, and dark patterns, there’s a lot here to still be surprised about. If you’re on social media, this should be required listening/watching.
I can’t wait to get the copy of her book.
Folks in the IndieWeb movement have begun to fix portions of the problem, but Shoshana Zuboff indicates that there are several additional levels of humane understanding that will need to be bridged to make sure their efforts aren’t just in vain. We’ll likely need to do more than just own our own data, but we’ll need to go a step or two further as well.
The thing I was shocked to not hear in this interview (and which may not be in the book either) is something that I think has been generally left unmentioned with respect to Facebook and elections and election tampering (29:18). Zuboff and Laporte discuss Facebook’s experiments in influencing people to vote in several tests for which they published academic papers. Even with the rumors that Mark Zuckerberg was eyeing a potential presidential run in 2020 with his trip across America and meeting people of all walks of life, no one floated the general idea that as the CEO of Facebook, he might use what they learned in those social experiments to help get himself (or even someone else) elected by sending social signals to certain communities to prevent them from voting while sending other signals to other communities to encourage them to vote. The research indicates that in a very divided political climate that with the right sorts of voting data, it wouldn’t take a whole lot of work for Facebook to help effectuate a landslide victory for particular candidates or even entire political parties!! And of course because of the distributed nature of such an attack on democracy, Facebook’s black box algorithms, and the subtlety of the experiments, it would be incredibly hard to prove that such a thing was even done.
I like her broad concept (around 43:00) where she discusses the idea of how people tend to frame new situations using pre-existing experience and that this may not always be the most useful thing to do for what can be complex ideas that don’t or won’t necessarily play out the same way given the potential massive shifts in paradigms.
Also of great interest is the idea of instrumentarianism as opposed to the older ideas of totalitarianism. (43:49) Totalitarian leaders used to rule by fear and intimidation and now big data stores can potentially create these same types of dynamics, but without the need for the fear and intimidation by more subtly influencing particular groups of people. When combined with the ideas behind “swarming” phenomenon or Mark Granovetter’s ideas of threshold reactions in psychology, only a very small number of people may need to be influenced digitally to create drastic outcomes. I don’t recall the reference specifically, but I recall a paper about the mathematics with respect to creating ethnic neighborhoods that only about 17% of people needed to be racists and move out of a neighborhood to begin to create ethnic homogeneity and drastically less diversity within a community.
Also tangentially touched on here, but not discussed directly, I can’t help but think that all of this data with some useful complexity theory might actually go a long way toward better defining (and being able to actually control) Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand.”
There’s just so much to consider here that it’s going to take several revisits to the ideas and some additional research to tease this all apart.
👓 MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder | Wired
Even juicy divorce speculation represents a chance to acknowledge how myriad factors—and people—contribute to the success of a company like Amazon.
👓 India’s Tighter E-Commerce Rules Frustrate Amazon and Walmart Plans | WSJ
Foreign companies will no longer be allowed to sell products from their own affiliated companies in India
NEW DELHI—India is tightening restrictions on foreign e-commerce companies operating in the country, a new challenge to Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc. as they bet billions on the nascent market.
Current rules forbid non-Indian online sellers from holding their own inventory and shipping it out to consumers, as is typically done in other countries. Instead, they have found a work-around by operating as online marketplaces and selling what are effectively their own products held by their affiliated local companies.
They will no longer be allowed to sell such goods, a division of India’s Commerce and Industry Ministry said in a statement Wednesday, an apparent attempt to close that loophole.
The new rules, which take effect Feb. 1, also bar foreign companies from entering into exclusive agreements with sellers. Amazon, for example, has in the past been the exclusive third-party online retailer to sell smartphones from the popular Chinese smartphone brand OnePlus.
Abneesh Roy, an analyst at Edelweiss Securities, noted that ahead of elections set for early next year, the government could be moving to appease owners of smaller shops that have been hit as customers buy more goods online.
“Shopkeepers have been unhappy,” he said. “In an election year, the government will definitely listen more to voters.” ❧
It’s nice to see foreign countries looking at what has happened to coutries like America with the rise of things like e-commerce, actually thinking about them and the longer term implications, and making rules to effect the potential outcomes.
Now the bigger follow up question is: is this a good thing? Perhaps there won’t be the community interruption we’ve seen in the US, but what do the overall effects look like decades hence? From a community perspective, from a competitive perspective?
December 27, 2018 at 12:26PM
👓 I Used to Write for Sports Illustrated. Now I Deliver Packages for Amazon. | The Atlantic
There’s a certain novelty, after decades at a legacy media company, in playing for the team that’s winning big.