Ted,
I'd like to offer some observations about the view of "Kindle" technology as a surreptitious data-collecting, value-generating device vis-à-vis elected passages from the article:
(a) "I will note, however, that since at least the time of Plato, virtually every communication technology has been accused of diminishing the presence and authority of the Word, from the human voice to the human hand on down to the typewriter, the word processor, and beyond.7"
Here I call into question the Derridean binary speech/writing chestnut that seems to be stated in a more recent communications technologies form: does Kindle really count as a fall from a purer literary tradition represented by the "book"? Does the latter enjoy a self-presence that the former cannot hope to have, necessarily seen (in the terms of your analysis) as its "form of appearance" only? Can the book really be seen (as it is here) as an absolute "point of departure" (Derrida), ripe as it will soon be to all the inner-contradictions of a close reading?. It appears it is in your discussion.
I suspect, in a word, Kindle is not the "infiltrated presence" you think it is, certainly not in terms of a strictly Marxian formulation of Amazon as exploiter of a reader's labour power. A lot of untested assumptions have been built into this ebook/audience commodity transition. There's a primary discrepancy between the use of Marxian analysis (notoriously self-enclosed critique of capitalist economy) and the presentation of Kindle as this necessarily open-ended, easily exploitable technology. Kindle looks like a slippery fish in the Marxist critic's hands.
(b) "At the risk of over-generalizing, it probably would be fair to say that most people consider Amazon.com to be an online retailer. That’s a safe enough assumption, but it’s only partially accurate. Since 2002, the company has actively—and until the last year or two, quietly—been making itself over into a “web services” provider, or even more ambitiously into a “platform” upon which to construct on- and offline businesses. "
Since the exposition begins with the original (more general rhetorical) claim of Kindle as a kind of "shadowy" trace of the more pristine book technology it seeks to supplant (a claim I'm saying is suspect in terms of the way it's given), you seem to spiral even deeper into more ambiguous binaries, the next being the "online retailer/web services provider" one that's as suspect as the first. The die's been cast for linking "online retailer" to legitimate as opposed to illegitimate offline business "data collection". What's called into question is the way readers in general collect data: the nature of reading itself, which you've nowhere outlined as you ought if the essay's primary claim of its illegitimate appropriations by Amazon Inc. is to be validated. You conclude that "Amazon’s goal with these and other efforts is to monetize any and all of the company’s excess capacity, and to transform idle assets into nonstop, value-producing ones." But, again, in what sense is the act of reading really a kind of "excess capacity" (surplus value) the Kindle user's unwittingly given to Amazon?
(c)"Readers, according to Certeau, surreptitiously raid texts as they meander through them, "insinuating … the ruses of pleasure and appropriation" as they render texts temporarily "habitable."17 In this way readers play a kind of joke on the gatekeepers of the "scriptural economy," whose power and authority they challenge through their small but significant acts of 'textual poaching.' "
What makes you think readers don't continue to enter "habitable" texts in this way, purposely appropriating all the ebook technology's potential uses (and abuses)? As one critic of your essay has aptly remarked, even Kindle readers can't be that easily commoditized. Aren't even traditional book consumers so much fixed capital to be appropriated (or misappropriated) by knowledge industries in general, such as education? Hasn't Amazon just capitalized on tendencies already present in the reading practices of a burgeoning young ereadership? My years as a secondary school teacher have taught me to see the self-reflexive nature of an emerging Internet savvy generation. Unsurprisingly, you've left us with what appears to be the most specious distinction of all: that between traditional "textual poachers"/Kindle readers in which a flesh-and-blood reader has been transformed into (almost cybourg-like) consumers of digitalized reading. You need no less than a complete 'epistemology' of ereading to make this claim.
(d)"If indeed Amazon aspires to transform itself into a kind of “utility,” one built significantly out of information provided to it by the public, shouldn’t it then begin taking on some of the public responsibilities of one? For starters this would require much greater transparency on Amazon’s part, a process that could begin by opening up its proprietary databases to those who would use the information to contribute to public knowledge. "
Have the lines of communication between reader and author ever been transparent in this idealized "proprietary" sense of knowledge sharing? I think of the academic world where dissertation readers/advisors are every bit as tyrannical (and self-serving) as Amazon-like corporations. And even as the corporatist universities academic departments subserve. No claims can be made for the public responsibility of Amazon to equally distribute corporate data bases among the exploited reading masses without also making similar ones for knowledge production and distribution everywhere else.