Authors, publishers and agents live and die inside — mostly die — by monitoring their product's position on the Amazon charts, which are adjusted hourly. Thomas, an author who penned the Kindle book Wealth Hazards, says literary types should take a step back because the system is easily corrupted. He says he's manipulated the system by buying his book 200 times and posting fake reviews hailing his self-described masterpiece.
Now he's peddling a new e-book, The Day the Kindle Died, in which he describes how he pulled off his ruse. He writes:
I've purchased my own book, Wealth Hazards, close to 200 times now. I wrote 42 customer reviews and voted on them 108 times. Not once was a review or vote rejected by Amazon. It took about 45 days to move the book up to #1, but after it got there I didn't feel it was appropriate to promote it - so I have not profited from it. I continue to buy 2 or 3 copies a day, write reviews and vote on the reviews and wait for Amazon to notice.They haven't. They pay me royalties every month and recommend the book to people who buy similar personal finance titles. My new book The Day the Kindle Died is even more obvious - but Amazon hasn't noticed. They even recommend it to customers who purchase Amazon's own Kindle publishing manual. Amazon clearly has a problem with ranking books, creating the bestseller lists and making suitable recommendations to customers, but they don't appear to be in a hurry to correct this.
What purpose do Amazon's reviews and rankings serve for you when you're shopping for books?
The common law part is a common ultra-right wing nervous tic. They are of the opinion that the real law is the common law and that much of the statutes etc are "unlawful" since they deviate from Blackstone's commentaries. It's also typically part of the income tax unconstitutional/fringed flag/access your government social security account shtick.
What's really funny is when people make that argument and then want to have a statutory prohibition against judges referring to sharia or "foreign law" in their decisions.
This is why: the common law is essentially looking at what current customs are, and then reflecting that in judicial decisions. This is the "common," i.e. implied law that is behind everything else. What's hilarious about the sharia freak out is that they are statutorily imposing a bar to judges developing the common law based on community standards.
Also, regarding the whole right wing tax protester shtick, they really don't understand that law is socially constructed. If no judge agrees with your interpretation of the law, and neither do the rest of society, then you have a problem. What various political factions try to do is mobilize enough judges, lawyers etc in their formative education to agree with their ideology. You see this in fights over law school professorial appointments, U.S. Supreme Court nominees, etc. It's also the reason that various highly conservative business interests sponsor groups like the Federalist Society. They become a pipeline for people who fit their sponsors political views, and help them get jobs in government, at major firms, for the judiciary etc. But law generally is a hegemonic ideology that serves to legitimate the actions of various actors in society. The problem is of course, when the ideology seems to vary wildly from the actual actions of various institutions.
Having said that, I do think think there is value in the common law approach, in that it allows us to learn from past mistakes; this is especially true in real property law. There are protections for property owners that have origin in the common law. They are designed to prevent scammers from trying to take your property. That's very relevant right about now in my practice. What's interesting to me is that the common law protections are clumsy and time consuming. That was probably not a big deal back in England when a few people owned most of the land. If we really think about "titles" for instance, we can think about titles of nobility, which were a kind of property right, with rights that the nobles could enforce against the monarch. Think Magna Carta.
In modern America we've tried to make real property ownership very common. The finance sector found that obeying ancient common law principles (some of which have been written into state laws) to be deeply inconvenient-- so they just don't do it. Every person may have the rights of the former English nobility/landed gentry, but the economic wherewithal to enforce that is often lacking. Even worse, we have a court system that treats individual property owners more like landless peasants than landed gentry.
In light of all of this, I actually have strong sympathy for people who are dismayed that their common law property rights are being trampled. However, I will say this to them:
Dear Angry Ultra-Right Patriots,
This is the world you built when you decided you valued screwing over people of color more than you valued an equitable distribution of wealth in our society.
You can talk about rights all you want but if you don't have the money to enforce those rights then good luck with that. And you expect that people are going to just "do what's right" even when doing what's wrong is more profitable for their career? Don't you even read the Bible you say you believe in -- the parts about how people are basically sinful and evil? You profess this and then expect that most people will do the right thing?
This is the result-- you are priced out of justice, and you have a court system that often displays contempt for the little guy. But where were you, conservative, common-law loving Americans, while African Americans were being convicted , incarcerated and executed at vastly disproportionate rates? You blamed them and said it was because they were promiscuous dope heads, and you cheered when the cops cracked heads down on the block, executed no-knock warrants and militarized the 'hood, while your kids hooked up at church camp and smoked dope and popped pills with their buddies at the weekend kegger.
I realize that Ehrenreich's book is kind of shocking and gets you all hepped up about communists. All I have to say is, try remembering what Jesus teaches in Matthew 25:40 "And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me."
Sincerely,
posted by wuwei at 5:45 PM on December 14, 2010 [20 favorites]
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