When I worked for the FSF I helped to run a campaign against the Amazon Kindle (and, DRM in general). We did an action called "The Kindle Swindle" in which we asked people to tag all DRM ebooks and the kindle itself with the tags "kindle swindle" and "DRM".
People went ahead and tagged close to a thousand products with the term "Kindle Swindle" and the Kindle advice was tagged with that phrase close to 400 times making it become one of the top four tags on the Kindle page. What is kind of neat is that for each tag-term has its own discussion forum. The "Kindle Swindle" tag has a relatively active set of discussion threads [1], and the original comment I wrote [2] has over 250 replies to it. I imagine some combination of blogging, tagging, and letter writing could help in some way to increase consumer awareness and this kind of work can be done in a distributed fashion by wikimedians worldwide. footnotes :[1] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle?ref_=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t :[2] http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle%20swindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx9U9IIOS8R4U3&cdThread=TxEMQ1LM199AP8&displayType=tagsDetail On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Renata St<renataw...@gmail.com> wrote: > It was raised before on the Village Pump, but I think this is so disturbing > that we ought to do something. > > "Alphascript Publishing" has published over 1900 (and counting) books, all > available on Amazon. Prices range from $31 to $179. All of these books are > simple computer-generated copies from Wikipedia and (at least according to > one Amazon reviewer) couple other public domain websites. Trouble is, from > book description page there is absolutely no way of knowing that the book is > a Wikipedia mirror on paper. At least several Amazon buyers have been > fooled. What really gets my blood boiling is that Amazon user "VDM Verlag > Dr.Müller" (I think someone exposed him as 100% shareholder of the > publishing co) goes on rating these products as "five star".... > > The publisher seems to observe the copyright (even includes full edit > history) so legal action seems impossible. Someone already contacted Amazon, > but they "are not responsible for the quality of books sold". In the > meantime the number of such books grew from 900 in June to almost 2000 as of > today... I think we should do something. At the very least publishing > product reviews warning that what this is.... > > See: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PrimeHunter/Alphascript_Publishing_sells_free_articles_as_expensive_books > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)/Archive_20#The_Alphascript-Amazon-Wikipedia_book_hoax > http://rufftoon.livejournal.com/59337.html > > Thanks, > Renata > > P.S. on a happier note: half of Wikipedia editors now can claim to be > "published authors". > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > -- I am running the Arizona Rock'n'Roll marathon with Team in Training. Help me reach my fundraising goals: http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/pfchangs10/joshuagay _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l