Amazon.com Could Be Worse Than Wal-Mart

What it is doing to book publishing and libraries is really beyond the pale. Barnes & Noble can hardly compete anymore because this Kindle shit has taken hold (BN has its Nook, but it doesn't sell as many units). It's being shoved down our throats, and many stupid people have actually done away with their real books in favor of downloading titles they don't own. Furthermore, Amazon.com is creating a monopoly and undercutting traditional booksellers, including B&N, by selling books for less. Eventually, as with all monopolies, the prices start going through the roof after all of the competition is killed off.

Jeff Bezos is the Bill Gates of publishing.

One good thing about Amazon is that more people find it easier to get their "books" published thanks to "eBooks," but of course there is nothing tangible, and reading from a reader is an inferior experience than reading a real, hard copy book. That may be an upside for somebody like me who would someday like to publish titles, but my argument still holds.

I really don't like the trend of companies trying to force us to rent instead of own.

I usually don't buy anything directly from them but from their cooperating booksellers to get titles of new/used books, CDs, and DVDs. I have saved thousands of dollars that way, so there is some good with this outfit. I typically don't buy any downloaded titles; I simply opt for free "purchases." Why spend a pile of money on a download when you can get a secondhand copy of the same thing for far less money and you OWN it?

However, Amazon.com is a notoriously shitty place in which to work:

Amazon’s also been painted as a pretty terrible place to work: A report on Gawkerdescribes a Tennessee warehouse where employees take forced overtime and perform monotonous work with minimal break time, while a 2011 newspaper report on Amazon’s warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania, told of over 100-degree temperatures and “a pace many could not sustain.”

I don't think even Wal-Mart is that horrible.