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Ways to give people a chance to do the right thing Sent: 03/27/2000 1:49 PM
check out new BioPiracy book on www.breskin.com I sent this to Alberto this morning: About a month and a half ago you sent me some links to into the guts of the Amazon.com land-use debacle. They got lost in my mail-crash. Please resend them or point me to someone who can connect me to the information again. Here is why: In the course of dinner-table discussion with my Dad last night, I decided that I have to build an intermediate page explaining these problems and a commentary discussing the problems with dotcom economics - that users go to BEFORE I link them from the book-icon on my page to the book reviews buy-buttons on Amazon's website. Prior to last night I had seen it as a pure Machiavellian dilemma - and presumed that the likelihood that large-scale social benefits that might accrue from people reading these books (and thereby raising the level of the discussion and debate) could or would outweigh the adverse localized impacts of buying the books from the evil empire. Because it seemed to me that contrary to your advice "send them to Barnes & Noble instead" that all dotcom bookstores were trashing both brick and mortar sites and trashing the communities in which they had chosen to locate, and because I clearly remembered when I had actively boycotted the first brick and mortar B&N and Crown stores because they seemed to mark a monopolist's attempt to usurp and destroy the majority of local non-antiquarian bookstores. But last night I had an "ah hah" and realized that I could provide an example of the kind of discussion I wanted to see, sort of a recursive approach, by giving the user a snapshot of the community impacts and macroeconomic issues that were really on the table - the page would thus raise the issues and then provide the user a chance to jump into the political fire, as well as providing a range of choice of sites to purchase the books from. |