KNOW THIS: Free Expression Depends on Free Transmission of Facts as well as Tweets
January 7, 2009
As we at The Know Something Project continue to delve into developments regarding free speech and e-books, it’s become apparent the two are closely related. Not only do e-books allow more writers to publish their writings and distribute them to an ever-growing audience; digital publishing gives the general reading public remarkable access to texts from around the world. Unless one lives in a Communist country, that is.
The Great Firewall is a software program from Chinese Internet provider China Unicom that limits access to everything on the Internet that is not approved by the Chinese government. According to a recent AOL.com article, Beijing banned sites “such as Twitter and YouTube and blogging sites WordPress and Blogger” last summer in anticipation not only of the Summer Olympics but of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
And China does not seem inclined to lighten such restrictions to its citizens’ Internet access any time soon. This past weekend, a three-hour, very-early-morning Great Firewall outage—now considered a likely glitch during upgrades—gave some Chinese night-owls a brief glimpse at the Internet the rest of the world knows. (It also resulted in some excited Twittering by world citizens normally restricted from Twitter, an apparently potentially dangerous on-line tool.)
Some in China do have open access to the Internet via virtual private networks (VPNs), networks primarily used by foreign businesses operating in China, businesses the Chinese government can’t afford to restrict and risk losing.** But most remain in the dark about all that is available on the world-wide web. Yet, the e-books market is predicted to boom in China over the next few years. Despite now-infamous restrictions placed on Chinese writer-activists who’d planned to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, the annual international celebration of free speech featured a Chinese pavilion that included a display of electronic readers. While the Chinese market for e-books remains small and the e-readers sold there are made primarily by local companies, the numbers of e-readers sold in 2009 (800,000) and total 2008 e-book sales ($33 million) there are widely acknowledged. It makes sense, of course, for such data to be publicized so more international retailers can be convinced to join present Chinese player Amazon and invest further in the country’s huge potential e-book market. Still, the irony remains that a publicly traded company like Amazon refuses to disclose specific sales numbers of its e-readers and e-books in the United States while such statistics from all players in a Communist country are readily available.
Why is Amazon so coy with its sales numbers? To divulge them would give competitors an advantage, Amazon founder and president Jeff Bezos has told reporters and shareholders many, many times. A company’s investors, however, base their investments on such data. The situation reminds us of the bankers at the huge institutions on Wall Street who methodically deceived their investors into believing their profits were much higher than they truly were, leading to an economic crisis that impacted not only an entire country, but the entire world economy.
Ironically enough, Jeff Bezos began his career as a financial analyst on Wall Street at D.E. Shaw, one of the world’s top hedge funds, where he worked his way up to be one of the firm’s four vice presidents in only four years. Also the former employer of President Obama’s Chief Economic Advisor Lawrence Summers, D.E. Shaw—like Amazon—is secretive about its finances, probably because light federal regulations of hedge funds give them no reason to disclose their numbers. According to a late 2008 Politico article, “The firm’s core specialty is in statistical arbitrage, which involves buying and selling huge numbers of stocks in very short amounts of time, ranging from mere seconds to several days. But how they make those decisions is very closely held information.” Yet, the fund—which uses “advanced mathematics and computer software to generate trading strategies”—is widely considered to be weathering the current recession very well. At the height of the economic disaster last year, D.E. Shaw political contributions (which are publicly reported thanks to organizations such as the Center for Responsive Politics) included contributions by the fund’s CEO and employees of more than $200,000 to national candidates, with less than one percent of that going to a Republican. The fund’s contributions to the Managed Funds Association, “the trade group that has led the charge on resisting increased regulation and taxation of hedge funds in Washington,” are also widely recognized.
Why does it matter that a CEO of any company opts to guard sales information? Since the onset of the worldwide financial crisis in the fall of 2008, it has become generally accepted that financial institutions ought to divulge their earnings honestly for the good of the financial industry and all the people it impacts. We assert, then, that a CEO whose company directly impacts another industry—like the book publishing industry—by driving down prices and inflating sales numbers that directly influence national data, thereby directly impacting peoples’ lives, becomes beholden to that industry’s players, investors, and consumers. Jeff Bezos is obligated to be honest about the number of e-readers sold and e-books sold and distributed for free by his company.
We are adamant on this point for yet another reason: E-books are not plastic widgets spit out by machines in factories; they are written works. Regardless of the content or quality of presentation, regardless of the formats in which written works are created and/or distributed, written works allow people to exercise one of their basic human rights—the right to freedom of expression. The CEO of what’s becoming the biggest book retailer in the world owes it to the consumers, writers, publishers, and investors entrenched in the world of book retailing to finally divulge concrete sales numbers for its e-readers and e-books.
As crack analysts on Wall Street continue to enable the Amazonian smokes and mirrors show by driving up the company’s stock price with every piece of supposed good news, questions also remain regarding which 401Ks, mutual funds, pension funds, and other resources in which Americans routinely invest are currently stuffed full with overrated Amazon stock, or which Wall Street hedge funds such as D.E. Shaw stand to profit when Amazon stocks eventually tumble.
In a recent shareholders’ meeting, Jeff Bezos noted that sales of big-ticket items are down, a truth that leads one to speculate whether such realities are what spur Bezos to actively tout his company’s prowess with e-books, much less expensive items that still can spur a company’s growth when they’re sold en masse. While a relatively pricey item to buy, a Kindle e-reader cannot be upgraded via inexpensive downloads, leading one to also speculate that Bezos prefers to encourage consumers to bank their dollars on buying new versions of the Amazon e-reader as quickly as Amazon can create them rather than pursue the much less expensive and much more accessible route of offering simple upgrades to products already purchased.
Last year we reported on an instance in which Amazon selectively deleted copies of George Orwell’s prophetic novels from privately owned Kindle readers. Regardless of the acknowledgement on the part of Jeff Bezos that such actions wronged Kindle owners, the fact remains that his company retains the power to perform such an act on any scale. If Jeff Bezos is allowed to continue to monopolize profitable book distribution and to use the smoke and mirrors of shallow public relations to distract investors into pumping more money into his company’s likely overrated stock, access to a truly free and easily tracked book publishing industry may become as limited as access to a truly free and easily tracked financial industry, or a truly free and easily tracked White House administration.
We believe the numbers behind all institutions ought to be reported honestly on a regular basis via procedures regulated by objective organizations that do not stand to benefit in any way from the institutions they’re charged with overseeing. Otherwise, no one will know which institutional claims are inflated and false, and all attempts to exercise one’s freedom of expression—whether through a published book one trusts will be distributed fairly or by voicing one’s informed opinions about wrongs performed by an institution—will be pursued in vain. Otherwise, we may as well move to China.
—Sherry Seiber
**For more on the Great Firewall and how it works—and doesn’t—read “The Connection Has Been Reset” by James Fallows from a pre-Beijing Olympics edition of The Atlantic.
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