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Doctorow Says Google & Amazon Stifle Progress
An anonymous reader writes "Google and Amazon are 'a danger to everyone involved in the creative industries' because they act as the intermediary between creators and audiences, says Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. He warns that the corporate giants will 'only fear competition from other established giants ... companies whose character as gatekeepers of video distribution and discovery won't be substantially different.' The solution, he says, is to use copyrights to lower the cost of entering the market. 'For so long as copyright holders think like short-timers, seeking a quick buck instead of a healthy competitive marketplace, they're doomed to work for their gatekeepers,' he says."
I have to disagree with TFA. Google and Amazon make it easier for the little guys to get noticed. It's true they act as intermediary, but they lower the entry cost that is normally associated with traditional publishing/marketing. ...and if you don't want to get noticed via Google or Amazon, go ahead and set up your site/service/product from scratch and hope that it get's noticed. It has worked for some!
On a personal note, my sister published her first book, and has played Amazon and Google asa well as traditional marketing, and is now her publisher's #1 seller. Her success is a combination of hard-work, traditional marketing (out of her own pocket) and playing the web.
J-F
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
Saying that Amazon and Google stifle innovation because they sit as an intermediary between creators and audiences is a bit like saying the Roman Catholic church stifles religion because a priest sits between the Creator and his followers.
It's more like the Roman Catholic church sits between the Faith and its followers. And they did stifle any changes from the doctrine, by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.
The OP had to have been speaking ironically there or else he is dense as neutronium. The whole big argument with Martin Luther and the Church was about giving people access to their faith. When he nailed his Theses to the church door, the Bible was not written in the vulgate. The masses were conducted in Latin and Catholicism remained a giant mystery religion. The reforms he proposed were threatening to the Church because if people did not need priests to intercede for them with God, there would be no need to continue supporting the massive ecclesiarchy.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
by torturing or murdering people who had different opinions. See the original Martin Luther, or Kepler.
Neither Martin Luther nor Johannes Kepler were tortured or murdered by the church. In fact, it was only *after* Martin Luther complained that the Copernican model was incompatible with scripture that the church established a doctrinal position on the structure of the solar system in order to win back protestant converts (as part of the counter-reformation). Before that, they really couldn't care less -- and were quite happy hiring Copernicus as a consultant to fix their church calendar.
You know, I completely agree that the catholic church has done some awful things -- but the relationship between science and religion during that time period is A LOT more complicated than most people think. It's really unfortunate that people cling to these simplistic accounts of "organized religion vs. progress."