The whole account of life at the Amazon warehouse is shockingly grim and bleak, conjuring up images of a technological wasteland from a Philip K. Dick novel. Here are some of the most disturbing details:

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"I'm in favor of ending the possibility of offering both free delivery and a five percent discount," she told BFM news television on Friday. "We need a law, so we're going to find a legislative window to introduce one."

Amazon in France declined to comment.

Filippetti's remark underscored tensions between the French government and U.S. online firms such as Amazon and Google, which have been criticized for paying too little to the creators of cultural or news content.

France, like other European countries, bans retailers from discounting books more than 5 percent from a sale price set by the publisher. This is to prevent small sellers from being crushed by giant retailers that can absorb bigger discounts.

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The Justice Department attorney, Lawrence Buterman, said a dramatic price increase in e-books was "no accident or unforeseen outcome" but the result of a deliberate plan by Apple and five book publishers to eliminate Seattle-based Amazon.com's $9.99 bargain price for popular e-books.

He asked U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who is overseeing a trial expected to last several weeks, to find that the computer company had violated anti-trust laws.

Apple lawyer Orin Snyder sharply disputed the government's claims, saying the company had been waiting eagerly for its chance to show it had enhanced competition and improved the e-book industry.

"Apple is going to trial because it did nothing wrong," he said. "Apple did not conspire with any publisher individually, collectively or otherwise to raise industry prices."

He called the government's case bizarre, saying: "Even our government is fallible, and sometimes the government just gets it wrong."

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Among the relieved is John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who was interviewed onstage for the conference's plenary session. His cheerfulness was especially striking when you consider that three months ago, Sargent, the most outspoken of the major publishers sued by the Justice Department for allegedly fixing e-book prices in collusion with Apple, was forced to settle that suit with the DOJ for an undisclosed amount. (Penguin, the other most recent settler, had to fork over $75 million.)

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What’s funny is, the adherents would have you believe that once you self-publish, the scales will fall from your eyes and you’ll recognize self-publishing as the One True Path. Traditional publishing will reveal itself to be a lost circle of Dante Alighieri's Hell, full of damaged souls who want to enrich themselves off your work while destroying every shred of your creativity.

I call shenanigans: Last year I self-published a novella, and all it did was encourage me to get an agent and seek a traditional deal for my full-length novel. If indeed there are scales on my eyes, they are still firmly in place.

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“We are thrilled at the enthusiastic customer response to our first original pilots,” said Roy Price, director of Amazon Studios in a press release. Regarding Amazon's bold move into online streaming territory, similar to Netflix, he said: “We built Amazon Studios so that customers could help decide which stories would make the very best movies and TV shows. It’s exciting to see the process in motion, doing exactly what we set out to do. The success of this first set of pilots has given us the push to try this approach with even more shows — this is just the beginning.”

The five shows will be released on Prime Instant Video later this year and in early 2014.

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The online sales behemoth recently announced Kindle Worlds, a digital publishing platform devoted entirely to fan fiction.

From Amazon's Web site:

Get ready for Kindle Worlds, a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games. With Kindle Worlds, you can write new stories based on featured Worlds, engage an audience of readers, and earn royalties. Amazon Publishing has secured licenses from Warner Bros. for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, with licenses for more Worlds on the way.

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This day may have been inevitable, but now it’s finally here. In its attempt to take over the world -- or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world -- Amazon is launching an art gallery.

There aren’t many available details yet about the endeavor, but an email announcement for an informational event was forwarded to Hyperallergic. It reads:

This summer, Amazon is planning to launch a Fine Art Gallery where customers will be able to purchase original artwork offered by a select group of invited galleries via Amazon.com. You are cordially invited to a special event in New York where we will introduce the Amazon Art marketplace to New York galleries … We have received overwhelming support from the galleries that have already joined the platform, and we would love the opportunity to offer your gallery’s selection in the Amazon Art store.

We reached out to Amazon for more information, but a public relations representative at the company replied, “We’re not able to comment at this time but stay tuned.”

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Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

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Although the world's largest video site has rented and sold movies and TV shows from major studios since late 2008, most people watch videos on YouTube for free.

It's the first time YouTube is introducing all-you-can-watch channels that require a monthly fee. The least expensive of the channels at will cost 99 cents a month but the average price is around $2.99.

In the field of paid video content online, YouTube is playing catch up to services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon, all of which have millions of paying customers.

But with a billion monthly visitors from around the globe, the Google-owned video service hopes to quickly add subscribers and add to the money it already makes from online advertising.

"This is just the beginning," said Malik Ducard, YouTube's director of content partnerships. The site plans to roll out a way for a broad number of partners to also launch pay channels on their own soon.

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In 2001 when my first novel, "Slab Rat," was published and I was important for about eight weeks, I was asked to write three very short stories for a literary magazine. I believe the maximum amount of time I was allotted for each story was 10 minutes. Sometimes it takes me 10 minutes to get a sentence the way I want it, but I decided to do it. I forget what the other two stories were, but one of them stayed with me: It was about a couple who go to real estate open houses to steal medication.

Cut to early spring 2012.

Thirty painkillers (prescribed for my bad back) were stolen out of my medicine cabinet. I was certain I knew who did it: someone in my building who had access to our keys. I set a trap for him and removed the remaining painkillers and replaced them with an over-the-counter painkiller that resembled them in color and shape -- but certainly did not deliver the same relief. A week later I left my apartment for a mere 10 minutes; when I returned, sure enough, about 30 more were missing. A check of the log revealed who had signed out the keys. As Michael Corleone says to his brother in "The Godfather II": “I know it was you, Fredo.”

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The author of bestsellers including "Along Came a Spider" and "Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas" currently occupies spots on four different New York Times bestseller lists with three discrete books. (Those would be "Alex Cross, Run"; "Now You See Her," written with Michael Ledwidge; and "I, Michael Bennett," written with Ledwidge also.)

Despite his success in a strain of genre fiction not often recommended in classrooms, Patterson has become, suddenly, the closest thing the publishing industry has to an ambassador. The multimillion-seller author placed an ad last weekend in the New York Times Book Review and in Publishers Weekly (depicted below) advocating for government intervention -- the same sort of bailout Goldman got -- in order to save an industry besieged by bookstore closings and consolidation of the few remaining major publishing houses.

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The bill would empower states to require online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. The sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.

Under current law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state. As a result, many online sales are essentially tax-free, giving Internet retailers a big advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.

The Senate voted 74 to 20 Monday to take up the bill. If that level of support continues, the Senate could pass the bill as early as this week.

Supporters say the bill is about fairness for businesses and lost revenue for states. Opponents say it would impose complicated regulations on retailers and doesn't have enough protections for small businesses. Businesses with less than $1 million a year in online sales would be exempt.

"While local, community-based stores and shops compete for customers on many levels, including service and selection, they cannot compete on sales tax," said Matthew Shay, president and CEO of the National Retail Federation. "Congress needs to address this disparity."

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The girl's father, Jean-Louis Constanza, presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic observation — a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment — that reveals a generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives" — that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age.

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Take Connie V., an Amazon customer who claims on consumer complaints forum Planetfeedback that, despite paying extra for expedited delivery to ensure a Dec. 22 arrival date, her purchases did not come until the day after Christmas.

"My gifts didn't arrive until December 26th, which made my child question why Santa didn't bring them in his sled," she wrote. "I wrote two complaints to the Amazon site and never even received a reply."

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The aggrieved tone was almost exactly the same as the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago when Amazon bought GoodReads -- at the time, the largest independent reader community on the Web.

The issues at hand aren't identical. In the Elsevier case, many of the academics who are most upset are strong believers in the principle of "open access" to scientific information, and they see Elsevier as their blood enemy. An excellent  summary of the argument against Elsevier can be found at the Cost of Knowledge but the gist is simple: Elsevier extracts huge profits from a business in which the vast majority of creative work is contributed on a voluntary basis by academics. The company then turns around and uses a portion of those profits to lobby for even tighter intellectual property control.

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The story of self-publishing is Jan Strnad, a 62-year-old educator hoping to retire in four years. To do so is going to require supplemental income, which he is currently earning from his self-published novels. In 2012, Jan made $11,406.31 from his work. That’s more than double what he made from the same book in the six months it was available from Kensington, a major publisher. He has since released a second work and now makes around $2,000 a month, even though you’ve never heard of him.

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I share the photo with some friends, and the verdict is universal. “A slightly more effeminate version of Truman Capote,” is perhaps the best summation. I stick with the picture, post it, and release my new website to the world. No one notices, though I fear lawyers from the Capote estate may one day send a cease-and-desist order.

Thus began my life as a published author.

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Many of the 16 million Goodreads users probably thought of different analogies than “joining the family.” How about “being swallowed by an anaconda after being squeezed to death”? Or my initial response on Twitter: “`Joins’ Ha. Ha. Good one. Like Poland `joined’ The Third Reich.”

On the Goodreads Facebook page, sentiment about the acquisition is running 10-to-one against it. Many members felt proprietary about the site and posted with surprising venom that they felt betrayed and were going to delete their accounts. A typical response: “You screwed us over. Take your money and run. You know the site you worked so hard on" will be corrupted by Amazon.”  More measured voices implored Goodreads “please don't compromise the integrity of the best online community of book lovers.”

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