Evil Amazon

[Tero]

This week I managed to shop online and B&N with 15% coupon and my 10% member discount and get 2 books for 1 dollar less than Amazon. Whew! A lot of work.

[laklak]

I checked on a private delivery company to ship Amazon to Swaziland - $198 / pound.

[Tero]

Guardian:
Amazon’s biggest fulfilment centre in the UK, in Tilbury, Essex, occupies 2m sq ft. (In comparison, Amazon’s first shed, leased in 1997, was 93,000 sq ft.) The volume of daily deliveries to homes has soared – from fewer than 360,000 a day in New York City in 2009 to more than 1.5m today. In China, Meituan’s scooter drivers, in their banana-yellow helmets and jackets, delivered 30m food orders during a single weekend in July. There are numbers for distressing waste: the packaging of home-delivered products now accounts for 30% of the solid rubbish the US generates annually, and the cardboard alone costs 1bn trees. And there are numbers for frenzied growth: the $3.8tn (£2.95tn) in global online sales in 2017 will near $6tn by 2024.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -the-world

[Tero]

Evil Amazon pretends to be do-gooders. Bezos is anti-Trump but
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... orkers-say
They are all about image. They will try to accommodate "green" things only after somebody makes a stink.

[Tero]

I made a simple goal: No longer buying useless stuff from Amazon just to get free shipping for 25 dollars. I do not have Prime because I am mainly using Amazon for used books and things. it has more sellers than other places. The main part of the profit goes to the seller, with evil Amazon taking a cut.

[Scot Dutchy]

Evil Amazon; very true.

'They know us better than we know ourselves': how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading

Amazon knows more than just what books I’ve read and when – it knows which parts of them I liked the most

Why buy a Kindle:

To limit the amount of data Amazon can collect on them, a number of readers are bypassing Amazon’s approved file formats and downloading pirated books to Kindle. The so-called Kindle hackers have found ways to modify book covers, change brightness and prevent tracking within ebooks.

While more tech-savvy users can attempt to alter the Kindle device or app to prevent tracking, the average reader can do little to escape Amazon’s reach. The company is now responsible for the sale of some 50% of physical books for major publishers and 80% of ebooks. For those who prefer to purchase books from brick-and-mortar stores, tracking reading on book social site Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, will put you back into the tech giant’s purview.

[Svartalf]

why pirate a kindle, are there not other formats of electronic books and other brands of book readers?

[Tero]

They are all interconvertible. It's just that people find Kindle paper white pleasant to read. And the battery works for many days at a time. I don't have one anymore, but they are cheap. Some 50 dollars.

[Sean Hayden]

“It is hard for us to wrap our minds around what artificial intelligence enables Amazon to do with this data,” she said. “The kinds of nuanced correlations Amazon is able to find through analyzing that data is beyond what we can conceptualize as human beings.”

--told you so.

[Scot Dutchy]

They are all interconvertible. It's just that people find Kindle paper white pleasant to read. And the battery works for many days at a time. I don't have one anymore, but they are cheap. Some 50 dollars.

Kindle only knows one format. Just buy a Kobo. Superior product no hassle.

[Tero]

That may be but we have free books from the library available to us
https://help.overdrive.com/en-us/0431.html

I had a Nook once but it did not last long enough to see how it works with the library

[Scot Dutchy]

You are sold on Amazon. Never go near them as there is no need to.

[Tero]

I'm almost stuck there for used books, aside crom local real stores. A good portion of booksellers do not have a website of their own. They may have a physical store for local sales.

Have cut down on Cds a lot, but I buy some here.
https://www.importcds.com/

I do not use any music streaming or other Amazon streaming.

[Tero]

Amazon paying 1.2% income tax
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/04/amazon- ... -2016.html

[laklak]

I don't care what they know about me.

"Privacy". What a quaint notion.