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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Amazon

1. March 29, 2012 05:42 PM

   Harry Potter Hits the E-Book Market

   By Ryan Chittum

   I've never understood quite why, in a digital age that allows companies to sell directly to their customers, that book publishers, record labels, writers, and artists have allowed third parties like Amazon and Apple to seize outsize control of their industries. J.K. Rowling doesn't either, apparently. The one-time billionaire has long resisted selling e-books of her Harry Potter series. Now...

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2. November 11, 2011 03:48 PM

   The Morning Call Revisits Amazon’s Work Conditions

   Allentown workers baked in the summer, froze in the winter

   By Ryan Chittum

   Remember that Morning Call investigation a couple of months ago into an Amazon sweatshop outside Allentown, Pennsylvania? The paper showed that the company endangered temp employees in a warehouse where temperatures sometimes hit 110 degrees all while issuing difficult-or-impossible-to-meet productivity standards in order to keep from hiring them full time. It turns out Amazon's climate-control problem was year-round. The paper...

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3. September 23, 2011 07:52 PM

   The Morning Call’s Amazon Sweatshop Probe

   An excellent investigation exposes poor conditions at a big Pennsylvania warehouse

   By Ryan Chittum

   What's going on with labor in Pennsylvania? It was just last month that foreign students working at Hershey's for the summer went on strike over poor labor conditions. Now, a huge investigation in the Allentown Morning Call shows Amazon treating its local warehouse workers like dirt—and endangering their health. Spencer Soper's terrific piece of reporting goes around the company, which...

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4. April 10, 2012 11:37 AM

   The Seattle Times Takes On Hometown Amazon

   A tough series on the dark side of the booming local company

   By Ryan Chittum

   Here in Seattle, Amazon is growing like crazy, adding thousands of jobs and building several skyscrapers just off downtown, something that will add hundreds of construction jobs. But at what cost? That's what The Seattle Times asks in a tough, excellent four-part series that riffs off the company's logo to go "Behind the smile in Seattle." I'm particularly interested in...

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5. August 3, 2011 06:38 PM

   WSJ Fronts Amazon’s Tax Avoidance Strategy

   Color-coded maps tell employees which states are safe, bad, and neutral

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's nice to see The Wall Street Journal take a page-one look at Amazon's aggressive tax avoidance, something I've written about quite a bit here at The Audit. Its story establishes even more clearly that avoiding sales taxes is a core part of the company's business and has been from the beginning. The Journal reports that Amazon went to great...

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6. September 14, 2011 10:28 AM

   Adventures With E-books, Kindle Single Edition

   By Felix Salmon

   Ryan Avent’s 90-page Kindle single, The Gated City, is a bargain at $1.99. It was produced in close consultation with the Kindle Singles editor, David Blum — the gatekeeper who determines what gets chosen to be a Kindle Single, and what gets relegated to the long tail of Kindle Direct Publishing. We’re running a great excerpt of Ryan’s book at...

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7. February 11, 2011 02:07 PM

   Amazon Bolts Texas’s “Unfavorable Regulatory Environment”

   But there's more to the story than we get from the AP and The Dallas Morning News

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Associated Press report that Amazon is closing its Texas warehouse due to—and this is a direct Amazon quote—the state's "unfavorable regulatory environment." That farcical statement, made by an exec in an email to employees leaked to the AP, shows how roguish the $85 billion corporation Amazon is when it comes to collecting sales taxes. The company—like other Internet and...

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8. November 27, 2012 06:50 AM

   Amazon sharecroppers

   The Seattle Times on the hometown giant's uneasy relationship with its merchants

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Seattle Times has another good story on Amazon, this time reporting on the hometown giant's lopsided relationship with its third-party retailers. Amazon's Marketplace is a digital consignment store that allows merchants to sell their stuff on Amazon.com in exchange for a 6 percent to 25 percent cut off the top. Sellers take the deal to get access to the...

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9. September 6, 2011 02:37 PM

   Amazon’s California Tax Battle

   Fighting to delay the end of its unfair advantage

   By Ryan Chittum

   While billionaire Jeff Bezos is off crashing spaceships (or wannabe spaceships, anyway) in the West Texas desert, his company's unfair tax advantage is disintegrating too. In July, a new California law forced online retailers like Amazon to collect sales taxes if they have a physical presence in the state, but the Los Angeles Times reports that Amazon is still refusing...

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10. May 31, 2012 11:18 AM

    Amazon’s California tax squeeze

    A WSJ follow story waters down an LAT scoop from two weeks ago

    By Ryan Chittum

    Amazon's long run of not paying collecting state and local sales taxes is coming to an end as legislatures finally force the Internet retailer to compete on something of a level playing field with everyone else. But that doesn't mean the company isn't trying to squeeze every last drop out of the struggling communities whose infrastructure enables its profits. The...

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11. September 12, 2012 01:33 AM

    Audit Notes: Amazon and antitrust, techspeak, ‘Peter Drucker with an Afro’

    The DOJ's ebook settlement could enable anticompetitive behavior

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik gets it on Amazon and the Justice Department's seriously misguided antitrust lawsuit against book publishers and Apple: Amazon's position in the e-book market was so close to unassailable at the time the publishers reached agreement with Apple that many in the industry are still reeling from the government's response. "I'm amazed the Department of...

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12. June 6, 2012 11:53 PM

    Audit Notes: Amazon turns on the A/C, Fairfax’s taxes, Ponzify

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Morning Call's Spencer Soper follows up on his Amazon sweatshop investigation, and reports that the company has since spent a whopping $52 million installing air conditioners in its warehouses: Donna Hoffman, co-director of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at theUniversity of California, Riverside, said media exposure about working conditions likely prompted the investment. The company faces intense competition...

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13. April 16, 2012 07:49 PM

    Audit Notes: Carr on Amazon, Muni Broadband, Too Big to Fail

    By Ryan Chittum

    David Carr's New York Times column today on Amazon, Apple, and the book publishers is excellent. He calls the Department of Justice's antitrust suit "the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ’N’ Groceries on Route 19 instead": But pull back a few thousand feet and take a broader look at the interests of consumers....

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14. April 13, 2012 08:05 PM

    Audit Notes: Ebooks, Amazon, and Apple Edition

    By Ryan Chittum

    Barry C. Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, writes a good Slate piece on the Justice Department's misguided suit against Apple and book publishers for fighting Amazon's ebooks monopoly. Lynn writes about why low prices aren't always good for consumers: For 200 years after the Boston Tea Party, anti-monopoly enforcement aimed mainly at...

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15. June 29, 2012 08:07 PM

    Audit Notes: Insufferable in Aspen, Libor, Amazon Marketplace

    Ending universal suffrage intrigues a CNBCer

    By Ryan Chittum

    CNBC's John Carney finally heard an idea that intrigued him at the Aspen Ideas Festival: Ending universal suffrage: His argument had two parts. The first was that some people simply are not ready for democracy. They have no functional conception of the state in their minds, much less an understanding of representative, deliberative democracy. Some are so poor that they...

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16. March 11, 2011 07:55 PM

    Audit Notes: Lehman’s Green Monster, Sands Storm, Amazon Taxes

    By Ryan Chittum

    Bloomberg's Christine Harper Richard and Bob Ivry circle back to the Fenway deal Lehman Brothers made with Hudson Castle that allowed it to cook its books by lending $3 billion to itself. Lehman turned souring real estate investments into top- rated securities that the bank’s insiders dubbed “goat poo,” according to court records. The securities, called Fenway commercial paper, helped...

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17. May 3, 2011 08:12 PM

    Audit Notes: Levin-Coburn Referrals; Falling Dollar, Rising Exports; Amazon Watch

    By Ryan Chittum

    Bloomberg reports that Senators Carl Levin and Tom Coburn have formally referred their bipartisan investigation of the financial crisis, and Goldman Sachs in particular, to the Department of Justice and the SEC for possible prosecution. I noticed The New York Times and Wall Street Journal failing to report the possible criminal-prosecution implications of the Levin-Coburn Report several weeks ago. It...

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18. April 11, 2012 07:56 PM

    Ebooks and Antitrust

    The Justice Department sues Apple and five book publishers for fighting Amazon

    By Ryan Chittum

    Back in 2010, a giant retailer had 90 percent of a market—a near total monopoly (monopsony, if you want to be precise). This company tried to dictate pricing in the industry via its dominant position (aided significantly, to be sure, by its early innovation in the market) and by the fact that it can use its profits elsewhere to subsidize...

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19. December 8, 2010 02:01 AM

    Slate Takes on Amazon’s Unfair Advantage

    The retailer manipulates nexus law to give customers tax breaks competitors can't offer

    By Ryan Chittum

    Slate's Farhad Manjoo wrote last month about how online retailers like Amazon get a huge unfair advantage over their bricks and mortar counterparts. I want to make sure to note this—it's a good piece on an important subject. Amazon's customers don't have to pay local sales tax (except in a few states where Amazon has physical locations), which means an...

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20. April 25, 2012 07:55 PM

    The Journal Misses on Ebooks and Antitrust

    By Ryan Chittum

    It's usually wise to read an "experts say" story a little more skeptically than you normally would. That's the case with a Wall Street Journal story earlier this week on the Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against five major book publishers and Apple, who were trying to break Amazon's 90 percent monopoly on the ebook retail market. The headline says...

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