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Downloads Give Amazon Jungle Fever
(Originally published in
The Guardian
, December 11, 2007.)
Let me start by saying that I love Amazon. I buy everything from
books to clothes to electronics to medication to food to batteries
to toys to furniture to baby supplies from the company. I once
even bought an ironing board on Amazon. No company can top
them for ease of use or for respecting consumer rights when it
comes to refunds, ensuring satisfaction, and taking good care of
loyal customers.
As a novelist, I couldn’t be happier about Amazon’s existence.
Not only does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation
tools that help me sell books, but it also has an affiliate program
that lets me get up to 8.5 percent in commissions for sales of my
books through the site — nearly doubling my royalty rate.
As a consumer advocate and activist, I’m delighted by almost
every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author’s
Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the
company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a
friend of mine) even wrote, “When someone buys a book, they
are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to
even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.”
More recently, Amazon stood up to the U.S. government,
who’d gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TER-
RORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to
turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers.
The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.
It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over
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