The FBI may have a new surveillance tool that can monitor even your thoughts - Amazon.com
To the casual eye, the current British and American book trades look as similar as peas in a pod. In fact, they have always operated in strikingly different ways. Stabilised as it was by the three-decker novel and the circulating library in the 19th century, and by the Net Book Agreement (resale price maintenance) in the 20th, the British book trade has always been more concerned with supporting the creation of product than with actually selling it.
The American book trade, which was wholly piratical until the US signed up to international copyright laws in the 1890s, and which has never had time for RPM, has always been much more concerned with shifting stock at the retail end. America pioneered the dime novel, mail order, deep discounting, the bestseller list, the book club, the "chaining" of franchised stores across the land and the "total book environment" (or Starbuckisation of outlets), as perfected by Borders. And, of course, America - with Jeff Bezos's Amazon - has brought us the web store.
The electronic sale of books is evolving at fruit-fly speed. And it's moving in interesting, and arguably sinister, directions. The American economist R Preston McAfee, for example, suggests that hip book buyers should "try logging into Amazon with your own identity and asking for a price on something. Then clear your cookies (so Amazon cannot access your personal information and purchasing history) and search again anonymously for the same item. Sometimes you will be quoted a different price, because when Amazon looks at your past spending pattern, and sees that you have not always gone for the lowest price, they will treat you as a poor searcher - a more inelastic customer - and make you a less attractive price offer."
What Amazon is doing, evidently, is profiling its customers. It can do this because, unlike in a walk-in bookstore, you can't make anonymous cash purchases. You have to leave a plastic trail. Unlike other web retailers, Amazon doesn't delete your credit-card information after purchase (it even seems to keep defunct card numbers). At some point in the not-too-distant future, Amazon and other leviathan web stores (there are currently no others of its size) will be able to anatomise their customers individually and with unprecedented precision. And, naturally, Bezos is moving into other products besides books.
We are what we read. Police are well aware of the self-defining, often self-incriminating, aspect of reading. They take a keen interest in a suspect's bookshelves. The "Unabomber" (Theodore Kaczynski) loved Conrad's Secret Agent and had read the book over a dozen times. Yigal Amir, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin, had Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal on his shelf (pages dealing with public assassination strategically marked). Timothy McVeigh, as he made his escape from the devastated Alfred P Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, had a sheaf of xeroxed pages from William Pierce's Turner Diaries. Carefully examined, our reading preferences are as uniquely different, and as revealing, as our fingerprints. Amazon, blazing its trail in the US and exporting it here through Amazon.co.uk, is building up what must be a highly revealing bank of information about the thinking classes - who are always, in the eyes of the authorities, the dangerous classes.
The FBI's licence to examine the library records of "persons of interest" was one of the more obnoxious aspects of the Patriot Act, which was the occasion of fierce resistance when the US Congress tried to extend it in December 2005. Surveillance, it was felt, was moving towards snooping. However, as we move into the 21st century, it is not the lending library but the electronic bookstore that will be the main provider of our books.
If I were an American, I would sacrifice the convenience of purchase by keyboard click ("we already have your card details") and hoof it down to the walk-in bookstore, dollars in hand. Sod convenience.
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