Buzzmaker

This morning I read an intriguing story. In an Orwellian move, Amazon.com had decided to revoke the ownership of the already purchased copies of  1984 and Animal Farm by Gearge Orwell. In the Amazon case this meant that not only they deleted the copies from their servers but they deleted all the copies purchased by the Kindle owners right from their Kindle devices.

First of all, I cannot see how the Amazon execs decided this move. They simply forgot about their customers and what they paid for. These people have paid to own a copy of a book. When I buy a book I can do whatever I want with it. The only thing that I am not allowed to do is to copy it. But in the end I own that book for the period it exists. I can give it as a gift to my grandchildren if I want. In most of the cases I will read it. I can just imagine how those people felt when they opened their devices and wanted to continue their reading and the book was gone. Not even a trace of it.

Amazon’s move seems like an act of Inquisition from the Dark Ages when books were burned in the main square in front of crowds of people. For sure their reasons are different: Inquisition wanted to stop the spread of knowledge while Amazon wanted to prevent a trial with the book copyright owner who changed his mind. I still don’t get it. How can somebody change his mind after the purchase was completed and still affect my ownership over the purchased book?

When I buy a book and the book is becoming older and older, it’s value usually increases. I can be asked if I want to sell it but it is my right to keep it and no one can stop me keeping it. Amazon did not asked their customers, they just erased the books from their customers’ devices and refunded the money paid for the purchase. They wanted to avoid a trial and now they will have lots of them, but besides that a lot of people that planned to purchase their Kindle devices will buy old but non-revocable books.

From my point of view Amazon did a serious mistake. They forgot about their promise to their customers (the customer bought the copy). I expect that Kindle sales to be seriously hit by this incident. Some comments I’ve read said that in one year from no we will not hear about Kindle anymore. For sure Amazon didn’t thought like their customers. You should think like your customers and if you cannot, with today technology it is easy to ask and find out.

What do you think? Would you still consider buying a Kindle? Or buying digital copies of books or other type of content?

One of the interesting questions that appeared on the Inbound Marketing Forum was posted by Dan Ronken. He was asking if it is not better when you start a blog to shut down the comments because when you see many posts with no comment you are dettered to write one. You can find the original question here.

I said that no comments is like Communism. As you may have already found out I come from a fomer communist country. In those days you were encouraged to have just the “official” opinion and all the others were banned. I lived those days and we were afraid to talk and tell what we were thinking. We could end in jail for our opinions (some people did it). It took me a long time to go over this fear but now I am cured.

In those days you had no option. Or you go with the crowd or you go to jail. Now, your readers have a multitude of options. They can read millions of blogs and they can comment on them. Why should you put yourself in a less appealing position than your competition? Why should you let your readers go to the others without getting the feedback about your posts?

On the other hand when you start opening the comments to your readers you will be in the same position but with much more content. You will still have no comments but you will have more posts than before.

Social media and blogging is about interaction. You want to start discussions not to just state your opinion. You want people to comment and if they have the choice but they do not comment then may be you do something wrong. You should open yourself to comments, invite your readers to state their opinion and create more intriguing content and then you will have comments.

What do you think? Are you still afraid of no comments?

One of the readers of my blog asked me why I have posted under the asics category tutorials for creating a blog.  For all of you who are wondering about this topic I just wanted to give you a set of basic tools in order to start blogging. Have other questions? Drop them here.

In an article from Harvard Business Publishing I found this piece of advice when you leave an organization if you were asked to:

Probably the most important is the first piece of advice but I think we should add a few to this list:

Have some more? Please add yours bellow!