As Anna Minard told you in the Morning News yesterday before the Big Slog Meltdown of Aught-Twelve, criticism of Amazon.com is starting to flow much faster and more freely. Publishers are pulling their e-books from Amazon. The excellent David Carr at the New York Times has written an excellent article suggesting that maybe Amazon is on the wrong side of this Department of Justice lawsuit against publishers and Apple.

Believe me—I've been covering this beat for years, and it's never been this popular to be this critical about Amazon.com. Baldur Bjarnason has published a thoughtful piece about how it's possible for someone to beat Amazon.com at the e-book game. Greenpeace just today published a report calling out Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple for their environmentally unfriendly data centers. Working Washington is planning a protest of Amazon.com's unfair tax practices today at 4:30 in Denny Park. The perception of Amazon as The Great Walmart in the Sky is catching on, and it doesn't take long for a few complaints to coalesce into something even greater.

Amazon has never had to put much energy into public relations—I've long joked that their PR phone line connects to an unattended answering machine in a locked basement room somewhere—because the word of mouth was so strong. But times have changed. Amazon's all grown up, and some people are treating it like a grown-up tech company. A grown-up tech company has more than one goodwill ambassador spreading the company's pocket change around to small presses and nonprofits. Amazon needs to become a good neighbor, or all this rumbling is only going to get louder.