Amazing Amazoning

I wonder how many people realize that their favorite book seller, Amazon, is out to destroy all their competition and put an end to hard copy books altogether?

Over the years they have been buying up bookstores, used bookstores, adding all the good stuff online, sucking the life out of these stores, leaving them behind with just more stuff (common books) and moving on. How can a brick-n-mortar store compete with this mega-monster bookstore, who regularly sells books at +30% off, and includes free shipping to boot (on orders over $25, that is.) And meanwhile, they continue to Kindle their real intent...to get rid of paper books and get us all hooked on their electronic readers. They are not interested in hooking us, and getting us all to add a Kindle to our bookshelves, but rather get rid of the books, and just Kindle.

It's a clever scheme and requires a great deal of patience, a long term business strategy to kill all your competition.

I for one do not find this policy at all 'user friendly.'

We chase the huge discounts and ignore the fact we are squeezing out the life blood of our local bookstores. I adore books, have hundreds and hundreds of them on my shelf. Sure, getting rid of them all and replacing them with digital copies would be more space efficient, but I just love the book as it is, with worn covers, ripped pages, and that very neat sound of flesh rubbing across the paper as I turn pages. Maybe the Kindle will recreate an electronic sound for you, of that page turning sound, sampled from a real book, but that just isn't good enough for me.

No thanks. I'll keep my books. And my fountain pens, too. Hell, I even go to the vegetable market and get foodstuffs that are hopefully closer to the 'real thing' rather than all this processed shit grown with space-age Monsanto seeds.

We really are living in an age of the Corporation. The people of my land were recently shocked when our tipped-to-the-right-corporate Supreme Court ruled that corporations are allotted all Constitutional rights as a person. Well, except if a corporation intentionally harms people (and they do...ALL the time.) You can't sentence a corporation to jail.

Our greed, the 34% discount of most books, is luring us to a future world that perhaps we are unaware that we create.