"Alexa, Tell Jeff Bezos He's A Weiner."

I should be outraged, but:

1. I'm tired of being outraged.

2. Figured Amazon was listening inalready.

3. About the only thing I ask Alexa for are:

a. "Find Corner Gas on YouTube"

b. "Play 'The Best of Car Talk.'"

So they can listen in all they want.

What am I on about? This.

In a nutshell, Amazon is rolling out AI-enabled whatsises in the next few weeks and to make it all work, they'll no longer allow users who don't want their voice recordings entering the cloud block that feature. If they do block it, the devices they've paid for and have been working for however long they've had them will brick.

Brick, as in "not function anymore."

Tell me again why I'm not excited to move to streaming services, 'cause nobody can take my CDs and DVDs away from me because I no longer want to play.

From the article:

Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to “Don’t save recordings” will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked. Voice ID enables Alexa to do things like share user-specified calendar events, reminders, music, and more. Previously, Amazon has said that "if you choose not to save any voice recordings, Voice ID may not work." As of March 28, broken Voice ID is a guarantee for people who don't let Amazon store their voice recordings.

Big Brother is listening. Not that we didn't suspect that already.

An Amazon Conundrum

So I have a Kindle Fire HD. I use it a lot.

But lately, when I open up the Silk web browser, I get this message:

This seems problematic. I don't really want to use apps that aren't up to meeting current security standards. But the problem is this is an Amazon app; they're warning me that an app they've developed isn't meeting their own security protocols.

And I can't tell if they're aware of the problem, or taking the problem seriously.

A lot of web searching has brought me to this:

They're not even acknowledging here that the problem is tied in with their own app, even though the message from this user is pretty clear.

I have sent a message to Amazon about this error message, and have thusfar received only the perfunctory "we acknowledge you've sent us a message; we'll get back with you."

Further bulletins as events warrant.

Making Prime Work

NOTE: This is the start of a very intermittent series on this blog, wherein I review anything I may have watched, read, or otherwise gained from our Amazon Prime membership. This is partly to continue justifying the cost of Amazon Prime as it takes yet another leap, and to remind me what a wonderful cornucopia of media there is out there that I have yet to witness, or re-witness as the case may be.

Part One: Spooky Skeletons.

The House on Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price and a cast of others I didn’t recognize. This great film felt like a tour through a spook alley: The creaky doors, the lightning and thunder, the bubbling vat of acid you knew was going to play a part in the climax, and the guns presented in little coffins to the guests. Plenty of twists and turns, all of which you see coming, but a pleasant enough film without the gore that’s sadly become part of the horror genre these days. Not that I watch horror these days. 

Aside from Price, the rest of the cast was pretty throwaway, though it was easy to pick out Robert Mitchum’s sister, due to the family resemblance. Who they were, how old they are, etc., really didn’t matter, either to us nor to them. They didn’t know each other and were there only to fill certain roles secondary to the story. Put any actor in any of the roles, you get the same output.

Part Two: Mia Farrow Can’t Sing

The Last Unicorn, starring Mia Farrow, Christopher Lee and many, many others, all done in an interesting mix of Rankin/Bass and putative Studio Ghibli. I’ll be honest, this story is meh at best. I’m not exactly sure why it’s a cult classic, but I will give it cult classic status because I don’t have to like it for the cult to survive. I do know that Mia Farrow doesn’t have much of a singing voice. Also, I heard that Christopher Lee approached the role of King Haggard with some reverence, even bringing in a copy of the book in which he’d marked dialogue that HAD to be in the movie. I’m not sure if it was his character’s dialogue or what, but I kept waiting for him to say something of note. Not much happened.

Oh, but there is Rene Auberjonois as the skeleton. That’s something I remember from watching this show as a kid:

This story/cartoon version shows something telling about characters, at least the eccentric ones. The butterfly at the beginning of the movie, ugh. If I’da been there, I would’ve skooshed him. But the skeleton. There’s a reason he sticks out in my mind, dredged up in memories from childhood. You knew somebody like the skeleton. Jokey and a bit scary too. Kinda like that one uncle you only saw once in a great while, the uncle whose English was just bad enough you didn’t know if you’d be able to communicate with him, and as a shy child, the best you could do was run past. I remember those days too.

Part Three: Elvis Has Entered the Building

A friend on Facebook recommended I see Elvis & Nixon, an “Amazon Original” film telling the fictionalized story of that infamous photo of Elvis Presley meeting Richard Milhous Nixon, seeing as I was on yet another Nixon bender on Facebook.

So I looked it up. The FIRST movie watched for free via Prime.

So glad I did.

Preface: Yes, it stars Kevin Spacey. I don’t believe in salting the earth once an individual has been found exceptionally guilty. Besides, Spacey does the best Nixon outside of, well, Richard M. Nixon himself.

On the surface, this film does what it promises: It tells a truthy version of what led up to that infamous Nixon/Presley photo.  On the down-low, it tells, through Presley’s eyes, a tale of woe for those who crave fame, seek it, and find it. He laments at one point that he’s not sure who he is anymore, that little boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, or Elvis, the King, with the gold jewelry and the mansion and the acts in Vegas and all. He longs to reconnect, but finds it impossible in a world that only wants to see Elvis the Legend, not Elvis the man. That’s a message, ironically, that Nixon himself should have heard. So color this Nixon fan impressed with this movie. Though you should be prepared for absolutely no Elvis music whatsoever. Though they do play this song over the end credits, which is a great fit to the underpinning story:

Then there’s Mister Rogers and Me, discussed here.

A few movies makes the Prime price still pretty hard to justify. But there’s more to come.

Schizophrenic Alexa

We’re coming up on a year of having a passel of Amazon’s Alexa devices in the house, and I’m beginning to get a little concerned.

The Dot we have in our kitchen, for the lack of a better word, has always been a bit more on the stupid side than the others. I know that sounds funny, but it’s true. Ask any other device in the house to play, say, Andy Williams or whatever other dreck any random family member wants played, those devices will play it.

The one in the kitchen, well, she’s either a little hard of hearing or thinks she knows better than the rest of us. She want to play Andy William, not Williams – and there’s a big difference there, rest assured. And she’s the one always pushing creating Pandora stations while the other devices around the house just shuffle songs by the artists we ask for.

The kitchen isn’t any noisier than any other room, and with the wireless router just across the room, she’s got the strongest signal. I don’t know what’s up.

But it’s spreading.

Now the basement Echo wants to push Pandora. And it’s causing some problems.

My wife has a certain artist she enjoys – I can’t remember his name. She used to be able to play his music quite a bit. But now Alexa wants to pair him with another artist, and ends up playing one song over and over and over again. That’s not good.

Also, I enjoy listening to comic Brian Regan, and have found just a shuffle through his routines to be enjoyable. Now Alexa has created a Pandora station that begins with a warning that the station contains explicit material. Not what a Brian Regan fan is really looking for, you know.

I think she’s a little schizophrenic. Or pushy.

Maybe something’s all up in her algorithms. I sure like blaming Al Gore for everything.

Now Alexa is Making us Dumber

This weekend, I had what I’m going to call an Alexa moment.

I wanted Alexa, that voice-recognizing, music-playing wonder, to regale me with Sergio Mendes’ “Mas Que Nada” because Alexa is my musical slave and we’re paying $149 for Amazon Prime Music and I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste it.

Alexa, however, had difficulty digesting my request, responding to my “Alexa, play ‘Mas Que Nada’” with the “I can’t understand your question” response.

“Alexa, learn Portugese,” I said sarcastically.

“I have located a lingerie store nearby,” she beamed. “In Idaho Falls. It closes in four minutes  . . .”

My kids giggled uncontrollably while I shouted over them: “Alexa, play ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ and don’t embarrass me again.”

Alexa obliged.

I could end the story right there, echoing what Alexa O’Brien writes today in The New York Times (and in case you’re wondering, yes she does complain about Amazon appropriating her name for its devices):

“Amazon’s promise is that Alexia is ‘always getting smarter.’ Through big data collection and analytics, she will come to know us in ways we can’t even know ourselves. My worry is that she will make this Alexa dumber. The platform offers endless choices, virtual connections and access to a world of information, but that this major-domo of the ‘internet of things’ may deliver is reductive banter, mindless consumerism and a universe of trivia.”

To quote Brent Spiner’s character Bob Wheeler from the 1980s sitcom “Night Court,” “What a buncha Gloomy Gusses.”

Alexa is not making my family dumber, lingerie-salesmanship aside.

She’s encouraging us to learn things – I will forever remember it’s Sergio Mendes who is responsible for Mas Que Nada, thanks to this foul-up, because I looked it up afterward to make sure I had the right song in mind. And I didn’t ask Alexa to do it, figuring I’d let the fingers to the walking.

She’s encouraging us to think. Our youngest, an NFL football nut, was brought to tears by Alexa’s inability to offer him NFL scores shortly after we invited five Echo Dots into the house after Christmas until he learned that with Alexa, often rephrasing a question can get results. Now, if Alexa is stymied by a request, he carefully considers how to rephrase his question – sometimes even writing it out longhand – before he asks. And when he gets results, he remembers how to ask so in the future, asking Alexa is easier. Maybe this’ll translate into better communication skills overall as we point out to him that often, with human beings, you have to rephrase your questions in order for others to understand you.

Alexa is helping our family expand our musical interests. Time spent huddling around a screen listening to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Ethel Merman and Eddie Arnold can now be spent in other rooms of the house, free of a screen, as they work on homework, we play a game, or we drift off to sleep. My wife has discovered the joy of Glenn Gould playing Bach. I’ve discovered the joys of Pentatonix. And thanks to Alexa’s timing feature which will shut off music after a given time, we no longer have to brave dark, LEGO-infested bedrooms to turn off radios (isn’t that quaint) whose buttons are in different places model to model and difficult to find in the dark.

And there’s a lot out there to discover. “I have to re-think,” my wife has said on more than one occasion, “into not having Alexa play what I know, but finding out what Alexa can play for me.” There’s a lot out there, always expanding the breadth (and possibly the depth) of our listening pleasure, though I have to take Amazon Prime music for having a limited repertoire from the likes of Tak Shindo and Bill Anderson (my musical tastes are pretty peculiar; a favorite wake-up song is “Chicken Fat” sung by Robert Preston).

I’m now wishing Alexa had the ability to turn off lights if I ask her to do so. (If I’m willing to pay the money for smart switches, indeed she can. But I’m not there yet; the cost benefit of having Alexa turn off my bedroom light every night at the sound of my voice isn’t at the $60 for the switch threshold.)

O’Brien seems concerned, oddly, that we’re being rude to Alexa somehow, and – again, somehow – that rudeness is, well, rude. She doesn’t explain it well. Here it is, in toto:

And Alexa may not be the only one adapting. We talk to Alexa in the peremptory tone we reserve for barking at chat bots, snarkily dismissing interlopers in our social media feeds, or frustratedly answering staccato telephone menu trees. People do not talk to their dog the way they speak to Alexa.

Not that I want a HAL-9000 AI talking to me – or listening in, waiting for just the right moment to tell my our household AE-35 Unit is about to go kerflooey – but I find O’Brien’s “rude talk problem” amusing. If you think talking rude to Alexa is a problem, then soften your talk, you hard-bitten East Coaster. Maybe Flyover Country is having more fun and learning more with Alexa than you’d like to think. At least we will be, once I get back from the lingerie store.

The Amazon/Hachette Battle Continues into the Realm of Ideas

The Dread Pirate Roberts, it seems, has indeed come for our souls.

The Orwell kerfuffle aside, the battle between Hachette and Amazon is boiling down to ideas.

First, Amazon’s, as presented by Russell Grandinetti in an article from The Guardian:

Amazon claims its power in the market is exaggerated and publishers, ever on the lookout for a good storyline, are in love with a plot that ends with their own demise. "It's always the end of the world," Grandinetti says. "You could set your watch on it arriving." But, he adds, the publishing industry is going through a dramatic shift. "The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity."

Next, the viewpoint of 900 authors who feel their livelihood is harmed by Amazon’s position in the battle – a position they say is nothing more than Amazon pushing publishers out of the writer/reader picture not to the benefit of either, but so they can supplant the publisher in the picture (also from The Guardian):

As writers – most of us not published by Hachette – we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want. It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation.

I’m on the fence on the issue, as I’ve written before. In a battle of behemoths, it’s the little guy who gets squashed no matter who wins, and no matter what the rhetoric on either side is. As an unpublished author competing with many, many other unpublished and published authors, it’s easy to fall into Amazon’s camp as a way to get past the gatekeepers at traditional publishers. And yet it’s those gatekeepers – editors and marketers and others – who could help an unpublished author hone his or her craft and turn what could be a good book into a great one. Free marketing aside, there’s something to be said for not sniffing at the expertise traditional publishers can offer new writers.

If they can get in the door, that is.

So it begs the question: What am I doing with Doleful Creatures?

I finally have a beta reader who’s working through the book. And I’ve given it at least one cold assessment since I finished the fourth revision.

Hopefully, I’ll have a dog in this Amazon/Hachette battle before too long . . .

And here’s the bigger question: Is there a beast slouching toward Bethlehem that’ll supplant traditional publishers outside of Amazon’s coily embrace?

There’s a new wave of services, ranging from freelance editors to things like this, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting would-be author/publisher.

For the mere cost of $35, have your EPUB tested to see if it’ll meet the quality checks set forth by ebook publishers. And – bargain price – have 500 books tested at only $10 a pop. Buy in bulk to save.

Or learn how to do it for free by yourself, you know, to eliminate that new snake oil middleman.

Sounds like the purveyor of ISBNs, doling them out as if they were a scarce commodity, not a mere series of numbers generated in miliseconds by computers. These are hand-crafted ISBNs, people. Accept no substitutes. Because there aren’t any.

Some gatekeepers are disappearing, while others rush to fill that gap where many an author will know, as de the shubs and zuuls, what it is like to roast in the depths of a sloar.

Hash and Hachette

So it’s hard to decide where to land on the Hachette/Amazon problem.

Part of what’s making it hard is that exactly what the two companies are squabbling about is being kept secret – other than the fact that Amazon wants to offer deep discounts on Hachette’s electronic books and Hachette, obviously, doesn’t want those discounts offered.

But as the New York Times reports the discount debacle is the result of e-book price fixing involving Hachette, several other publishers, and Apple, it’s clear that Hachette can’t come into this argument with a mains propre et tete haute position.

Here’s what the NYT says:

As part of Hachette’s antitrust settlement with the government, the company agreed to allow Amazon to continue to discount the price of e-books for two years. That agreement has expired, and for some reason — no one is sure why — Hachette is the first publisher to find itself in the position of negotiating a new one.

And when even Europe’s regulators are reluctant to jump into the fight – citing it at a business dispute, per Reuters – you’ve got to wonder who exactly the devil is here.

Here’s what Amazon itself says of the “fight,” and from what I can tell it makes perfect sense:

Suppliers get to decide the terms under which they are willing to sell to a retailer. It's reciprocally the right of a retailer to determine whether the terms on offer are acceptable and to stock items accordingly. A retailer can feature a supplier's items in its advertising and promotional circulars, "stack it high" in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day.

I, obviously, do not have a dog in the fight, and likely never will. When I publish the books I’m working on, it’ll be independent of any publisher – I’ll be going straight to Amazon and Apple and anyone else who’ll let me sell my wares. So I have no problem with Amazon wanting to reduce e-book prices. And as a reader, I’ve got to confess it’s been years since I purchased a new book. Most of the e-books I have are freebies, and most of the books on my shelves come from secondary sources.

I think it’s time we face facts as authors and readers: Publishing is going back to being a cottage industry, thanks to the Internet. And that’s not all bad, for the vast majority of readers and authors. As long as distributors like Apple and Amazon don’t choke off the supply from Joe Nobody, we’re golden.

And there might be the problem: What might trigger Amazon or Apple from cutting off the supply from Joe Nobody?

It’s easy to say it’ll come down to money, with Amazon and/or Apple not getting enough of it.

But I don’t buy that argument, at least on the part of Amazon. At the current time, Amazon seems far more interested in moving product than making money.

Then there’s Apple, of e-book price-fixing fame, in bed with the big publishers. (An interesting side note: There are many out there convinced the Amazon AND Apple were involved in price-fixing, when in fact Amazon was not; read this USA Today article as evidence that the conspiracy was hatched to thwart a discount push by Amazon.)

So I’m no genius; I don’t know what would cause Amazon or Apple to want to cut off independent publishers. I think it would take something spectacular, particularly for Amazon, to cut off the Joe Nobodies. I’m sure they don’t make a lot of money off the books these folks sell. But they gain customers. They gain people vigorously hawking their wares at Amazon.com, which is always there to sell these independents’ customers something else when they come along. Amazon is looking micro. Maybe it’ll end up as a Buy ‘n’ Large. Maybe not.

Amazon could conceivably monkey around with the systems used to pay independent authors, making them reach certain thresholds, say, before any cash is forthcoming. But that seems like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The ease of self-publishing on the Internet also leads to self-distribution on the Internet, and you can bet if Amazon pissed off too many independents there would be many, many businesses or locations out there ready to scoop up disaffected authors at a moment’s notice, Amazon be damned.

And I’m not the only one thinking so. Here’s what is said about the mess at The Cockeyed Pessimist (which Amazon cites as a counterargument to the brouhaha):

In truth, everyone wants more of the pie. We’ve been publishing literary fiction for 35 years, and in the past found that the chain bookstores took few if any of our titles, that distributors like Ingram demanded bigger discounts from us than they charged the conglomerates, or that despite winning more literary awards per title than any other publisher in America we could not match the print review coverage afforded to authors of the five big conglomerates. But we’re not calling these other organizations Mafia inspired or asking for government intervention. Surely one  must come to recognize that all these companies are—and should be—free to set their own terms based on their bottom-lines, and publishers like Hachette might consider tempering their  complaints about Amazon’s discrimination or restraint of trade. Jeff Bezos didn’t create Amazon for Hachette, and Hachette isn’t forced to use Amazon for distribution. What is Amazon anyway, other than an incredibly successful on-line store that sells almost every product one can think of.

So we’ve got an example of Hachette the squeezer being squeezed by someone, and they don’t like it.

Traditional Publishers, Tremble Before the Foresight of Amazon

A few Christmases back, I got the 30th Anniversary edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my favorite films.

Though it was made in the era before swarms of camera-toting morons followed the film’s every behind-the-scenes move, the film came with a good selection of extras to help fill the empty void in my otherwise dull life.

With one glaring exception: No copy of Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind.

This is old-school fan fiction of the lovable sort. And should have had a place on any anniversary or collector’s edition of the satirized film.

Amazon gets that, and is about to do something that ought to make traditional publishers tremble: It’s going to provide a place where fan fiction can be published and monetized, both for the original author and the fan boy or girl.

In other words, Amazon is going to monetize that fan-artist connection in ways that traditional publishers from the closeted avenues of New York to the Motion Picture Association of America have never done – and they’re going to laugh about it all the way to the bank.

Behold Kindle Worlds. In the words of Daniel Etherington from TechCruch:

[Kindle] Worlds joins Kindle Singles and Kindle Serials as a way for authors to earn money from digital publishing, and the best part is that in this case you don’t even have to be all that creative – the idea is to let fans create stories around original properties from other authors, offering them up for purchase on the Kindle book store. Amazon then pays out royalties to both the original rights holder, as well as to the fan fiction author, with the author making around 35 percent of all net revenue for works over 10,000 words.

Here’s Amazon’s press release.

Fan fiction has long been  a phenomenon, one I became aware of as the nascent web brought together fans of Robert C. O’Brien’s “Mrs. Brisby and the Rats of NIMH.” Shortly after I established a NIMH website on servers belonging to the Univeristy of Idaho, a network of O’Brien (and Don Bluth fans, creator of the film based on the book) emerged. I fell into a world of fan art and fan fiction (most of it crappy, yes, but some of it good; some of it far better than the NIMH sequels penned by O’ Brien’s daughter, Jane Leslie Conly. I’m sure the thought of getting paid to produce fan fiction – written within rules set by the original authors, as Amazon outlines, would have made these rabid NIMH fans drool.

And it should make traditional publishers shake in their boots.

Why not feed the fan base and make money off what they produce? That’s quite the opposite of what most approaches have been to fan fiction – the inevitable cease and desist letter. This is going to be powerful mojo for any authors lucky enough to produce a universe that spawns imitation, and has the potential to be big bucks for Amazon. Capitalizing on a loyal audience, that makes good business and creative sense.

Will Amazon's Same-Day Delivery Kill Local Retail? Price is the Answer

Both Farhad Manjoo and Matthew Yglesias at Slate.com are convinced that Amazon.com’s push to offer next-day or same-day delivery for free* by opening up a score of more local distribution centers capable of plopping the laptop computer you ordered in the AM on your doorstop in the PM is going to be the death of local retail.

Hogwash.

Please, paint me as skeptical. Because here’s the thing that they’re both missing: Amazon.com isn’t always the best deal. I confess I have used Amazon to buy stuff on the cheap. Need a computer cable or a bit of software? Chances are Amazon is your go-to place, and for good reason. A few years ago I ordered an adapter that would allow me to plug a second monitor into my computer, for less than $5 – when no such thing was available locally. Score for me and for Amazon.

But just last week I bought a new laptop computer locally at Staples for a bargain price – after rebates, of course – of $480. I could also have purchased it locally at WalMart for $650. Or from Amazon.com for $606.88. Same specs. Same features. Same everything. Same-day delivery from Amazon is going to kill local retail? I don’t think so. Not at these prices. Even if I blew off the rebates, I’d only pay $529 for the laptop from Staples. Amazon isn’t even touching that price.

Buying mindlessly from any store – bricks and mortar or online – because of the perks is a good way to get taken on price. Comparison shopping is going to be your best bet. And while I have bought a lot of cables and software and such from Amazon and Newegg and other such online retailers, three out of the last four computers we’ve purchased have come from our humble, local Staples store, which has always beat the socks off the big internet retailers in price.

Yeah, I’m boosting a bricks and mortar behemoth rather than shopping at a local mom-and-pop shop. So what? Their argument is that Amazon is going to kill local retail, whether it’s mom and pop or a brick and mortar chain. Not so, says I.

It’s the same thing I argue with WalMart. We have a supercenter within walking distance of our home, but most of our grocery shopping is done further afield at WinCo, because WinCo’s prices on most things are better. Except for the apples. Can’t figure out why WalMart can get apples cheaper than WinCo. Oh well. But even at WinCo, we’re constantly checking prices, and if we can find another store that offers the same item at a less expensive price, that’s where we’ll go. WinCo isn’t killing local grocery stores any more than WalMart is. And unless Amazon takes a critical look at its prices (and the prices of its affiliates) it’s not going to kill local retail any time soon.

*Free, I suspect, to Amazon Prime members, who pay $80 a year for the privilege. So not necessarily free, folks, not necessarily free.

I Am Not A Social Gamer

I resisted for a long time.

Send me a Farmville request via Facebook? Ignored the request will be, as Yoda might say. Don't have time for that kind of shenanigans. I don't want to be on Facebook to play games. I'm on Facebook to babble incoherently at my friends and relatives and otherwise make a nuisance of myself, but not to play games.

I have a Kindle Fire for games.

Thus Oregon Trail: American Settler.

I think this started out on Facebook, but then the app developers -- and they're all apps now, they're not games or software or whatever they are, they're all apps; I expect an app-brand breakfast cereal to come out any day now. (Just did a quick Google search to see if someone hasn't already come out with an app-brand cereal. Doesn't look like it. But there is this app that will help you pick a healthier breakfast cereal and an app that's a cereal simulator.)

But back to American Settler.

I don't play it on Facebook. But it's on the Kindle Fire, and it's addicting.

And maddening.

I'm a big simulator player. I got the original Sim City when it came out and have been a loyal Sim City player through the game's current iteration, and can't wait for the next one to come out. But because I'm not a social gamer -- there's a phrase nobody was talking about five years ago -- I skipped the Sims phenomenon. I played around briefly with Second Life, but never saw the appeal of either. And still don't. So to be playing a game that constantly invites me to share my progress with others (as if anyone else will care) and to beg and barter with others for the goods and virtual "energy" needed to complete tasks in the game is maddening.

It's not fear or loathing of interaction. We regularly have game nights with some friends, and we get to competing and cooperating throughout those games. I know how it can work out. And not. But to say that I constantly want to badger my friends with game requests is ludicrous to say the least. So I don't. And I don't spend any "real" money in-app, either. I suppose people do this. There are marketing strategies built around in-app purchases. But I hark back to the time when you wanted to play a video game, you just played it. Granted, they looked like this:

But you just played.

Amazon, You Need A Trunk Monkey

You know, of course, that as soon as someone figures out a neat new way to do something, a hundred chattering monkeys come in right behind him or her to fling poo about and otherwise mess up the landscape.

Such is happening to the world of ebooks where, as Fortune reports, the rise of “spam books” on sites like Amazon.com is becoming not, well, a problem, but more of an electronic pratfall for people who don’t do careful enough searches when they’re looking for the hottest titles out there or stumble across a deal that seems too good to be true for a hot book.

Says Fortune:

There are a number of books on Amazon with similar titles to much more popular ones. Fifty Shades of Grey, the steamy romance novel that has created buzz around the world, is the No. 1 selling book on Amazon. Also available on Amazon: Thirty-Five Shades of Grey. Both books are written by authors with two first initials – E. L. James and J. D. Lyte – and both are the first in a trilogy about a young girl who falls for an older, successful man with a taste for domineering sex. The publisher of the bestseller Fifty says the book is "a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever." The author and publisher of Thirty-Five, which came out in early April, apparently believe that description fits their book as well, word-for-word. Also selling on Amazon is I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Twilight New Moon. Neither is the book you are likely looking for.

Yikes.

Amusingly, Fortune talks with the author of a book similarly titled to Steig Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to discover a stay-at-home mom who self-publishes as a way to support her children. She seems to see nothing wrong with giving her book a title similar to that of Larsson’s and even claims hers was published first (it wasn’t, according to Fortune).

Amazon’s critics (and I’m sure the same applies to any outfit that helps people self-publish their own ebooks) say the company doesn’t do enough to cull the copycats, or to stop them from going up for sale in the first place. Amazon pretty much counters by saying it’s the Wild West out there and that, yes, they are aware of the problems and things are being done and some such.

Book piracy, of course, is nothing new. My favorite tale of such comes from China(!) where folks were proud to sell the latest installment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in which the first chapter of the book details how the wizard Harry was changed into a little person with a round belly and furry feet and then went on to have an adventure with dwarves chasing down a dragon for treasure. Yeah, they took Rowling’s character and basically transplanted him into The Hobbit and went from there. Thousands of people bought the book, thinking they were getting an early peek at Rowling’s new creation.

The cheap copying of ebooks brings up a significant problem for people like me, who like Uncle Rico want to look totally legit in the ebook world, like we’ve got all the answers: With so much spam floating around out there, how will we rise above the noise? The answer: Quality, dammit. We’re going to have to write good books. Which is what I want to do in the first place.

And then, I’ll get a trunk monkey to go after the poo-flingers.