In a bizarre twist, Amazon is currently selling a Kindle book that contains the Wikileaks diplomatic cables. Obviously it’s not going to be up for much longer but it’s still a strange development:
As you’d expect lots of fun is being had with Amazon’s user-generated tags:
But the reviewers who are laying into Amazon are missing the point, which is that the book is obviously going to be taken down in the next few hours, if not minutes. There’s no way anyone at Amazon has done this deliberately – a Kindle seller has uploaded this and it’ll be gone soon.
It’s either naked commercial opportunism or a cheeky prank. Even still, it’s pretty odd.
Update at 18:11 GMT – well I was wrong, a few hours have passed and the book is still on sale. And Amazon can hardly be oblivious given that even the BBC has picked up on it:
“In a twist to the story it has emerged that Amazon, which last week refused to host Wikileaks, is selling a Kindle version of the documents Wikileaks has leaked…”
So what’s going on at Amazon? Are they just being cynical?
Update at 21:11 GMT – it’s finally been taken down! I wonder what’ll happen to the copies that people bought and downloaded? Will Amazon offer refunds?
They can’t spell hypocrisy…
That made me laugh. Although maybe the people tagging it “hypocracy” are making up a new word meaning ‘government by hypocrites’?
…no, on balance I think they’re just bad spellers.
Oh yeah – maybe. Good coinage then!
“hypocracy” is a good one….I was sad that it probably wasn’t intentional :(