The Kindle ate my homework!

[pRICE cUBE]

Think the teacher bought this excuse?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090731/ap_o...le_lawsuit

SEATTLE – A high school student is suing Amazon.com Inc. for deleting an e-book he purchased for the Kindle reader, saying his electronic notes were bollixed, too.
Amazon CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos has apologized to Kindle customers for remotely removing copies of the George Orwell novels "1984" and "Animal Farm" from their e-reader devices. The company did so after learning the electronic editions were pirated, and it gave buyers automatic refunds. But Amazon did it without prior notice.

[GGD]

Paper and ink have been around for a really long time, I think they've gotten most of the bugs worked out of that technology.

[guitarist]

GGD wrote:
Paper and ink have been around for a really long time, I think they've gotten most of the bugs worked out of that technology.

Actually that's not true at all. The inherent bugs in the paper and ink system are mind-boggling.

In some ways, book publishing operates like one of Joseph Stalin's five-year plans. In the former Soviet Union, the government estimated how many combs, bars of soap, and cars people needed. Produce too many and you had a glut; too few meant chronic shortages. Speculating on future demand may be a fool's errand, but that's precisely what publishers do -- often missing badly, resulting in return rates of 40%, 50%, even 60% in some cases. Books are one of the few retail businesses in which store merchandise is fully returnable to the manufacturer for credit, a seemingly irrational practice that grew out of publishers' need to induce booksellers to carry backlist titles. Stocking thousands of low-margin books takes up shelf space, after all, and booksellers have rent to pay. To ensure books would be in stores for readers to peruse and purchase required easing the risk in holding unsold inventory.

Over the past 20 years, attempts to reform this highly inefficient distribution system have gone nowhere. There were simply too many entrenched interests, most notably Barnes & Noble, which resisted updating a model from which it clearly benefited...

From the current issue of Fast Company, a profile of Amazon and the book business:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/137/...page=0%2C1