Retailers in Virginia are pissed off about this:

After California, Texas, New York and Indiana all enacted legislation forcing Amazon to start collecting the taxes and imposed deadlines to do so, Virginia startled observers of the Amazon-tax-scofflaw issue by announcing just before Christmas that it would allow the company to skip collecting state sales tax despite having a physical presence in the state.

If they made the same deal with Walmart, there would be outrage in the streets for the government-subsidized unfair competition, but The Great Walmart in the Sky is measured on a different scale than brick-and-mortar retailers.

The Jewish Chronicle says:

Booksellers Waterstone's has apologised for inappropriately promoting Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf as a "perfect" Christmas present.

But the UK's largest bookshop chain has denied it is attempting to bolster sales of the infamously antisemitic work, despite the JC discovering several stores deliberately and prominently displaying the book.

Staff at Waterstone's in Huddersfield used a festive point-of-sale sticker to promote the book as "the perfect present" with an accompanying personal recommendation message by a staff member trumpeting the book as "an essential read for anyone".

A manager at a bookstore I worked at once noticed that a staff member had faced out a copy of The Turner Diaries on its shelf in fiction. He asked the employee why he did it, and the employee said it was to show that we carried everything, regardless of political inclination. The manager agreed that bookstores shouldn't censor the books that they carry, but he added, "Just because we have to carry that piece of shit book doesn't mean we have to make a big fucking production over it." The book stayed on the shelf, but it stayed inconspicuous, spine-out, from that point on. That strikes me as a pretty good rule of thumb for bookstores, I think.

• I promise that I will not recommend this book to you.

I'll be at the advice booth for about an hour, and my old bookselling muscles are aching for a workout. Let me help you find something for everyone on your shopping list, so you can finally know the simple joy of finishing your holiday shopping a full week before Christmas. I can make your shopping experience as painless as humanly possible, starting at 3 pm tomorrow. See you there.

Galleycat reported this morning that Senator Olympia Snowe called on Amazon.com to cancel their price-check app promotion. Snowe, a Republican from Maine, published a comment on her site just before the promotion took place on Saturday the 10th:

Amazon's promotion - paying consumers to visit small businesses and leave empty-handed - is an attack on Main Street businesses that employ workers in our communities. Small businesses are fighting everyday to compete with giant retailers, such as Amazon, and incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far...I urge Amazon to cancel its planned promotion, and look for ways to partner with Main Street, not promote anti-competitive behavior that could shutter the doors of America's small businesses.

This price check app promotion got Amazon more bad mainstream press than anything in recent memory. (Even the 1984 Kindle messup mostly simmered on literary blogs.) Between their fight against state taxes and this, they're starting to get on the testy sides of some prominent people. If I were Amazon, I'd be doing some unambiguously good things before the tide of public opinion turns against the public, but then, Amazon has never given much of a shit about the perception of their company, anyway.

Remember when I said that Amazon.com's Flow app was "about as close as Amazon can legally come to stealing from small businesses, taking advantage of their high overhead by treating them as product showrooms without giving them a cent of subsidy" about a month ago? I was wrong. They can get closer:

Apparently concerned that it's not already doing enough to undermine local physical retailers across the country, Amazon.com announced it will pay customers $5[*] to go into a local store, scan an item, walk out, and buy the same item on Amazon. Please don't do this cheap, sad thing.

To get the $5 discount, you're supposed to use Amazon's "Price Check" iPhone and Android app to scan in the bar code of an item and then indicate what price the item is being sold at. This gives Amazon valuable intelligence on how various retailers are pricing various items.

What a great idea! An online retailer convinces customers to do product research for them while simultaneously using small businesses as unpaid showrooms. Someone must have had a huge laugh in the South Lake Union conference room where that idea was brought up. Let me be clear: If you do this, you're a fucking asshole.

* Important notice: The discount is actually 5%, so it isn't really Amazon paying customers $5 unless they buy a $100 product through the app.

• A bookstore at midnight. Click to enlarge.

The dog was winding around and through the legs of roughly a hundred people who had gathered at Elliott Bay to celebrate the midnight release of Haruki Murakami's new novel, 1Q84. They browsed the stacks, killing time. Some of them were on dates with people who did not appreciate hanging out in a bookstore at midnight. A few other folks were giddy; some of them had had a few drinks. Customers were frantically filling out trivia forms; the questions ranged from the simple ("The title 1Q84 just might be an allusion to the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by which writer?") to the difficult ("Which three stories in [Murakami's first short story collection] Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman were originally published in 1984?").

Finally, at midnight, the winners of the trivia contest were announced: Three people had tied for first prize, with eleven out of twenty correct answers each. One of the winners couldn't restrain herself; she issued a joyous yelp. They each won an autographed copy of 1Q84. (Murakami's signature looks sketchy, but somehow precise. The characters float above each other in loosely arranged constellations. Find photos of the signature and the night in a slideshow over here.) Seven more copies were raffled off, and then everyone formed a polite line and picked up their unsigned copies. Several people openly grumbled about the dust jacket of the book. As part of his striking design—the book really does look like an event, with a 2001-like stately buildup to the first few pages of text—Chip Kidd chose to make the dust jacket out of a tracing-paper-like material that crumpled easily and didn't want to hold the shape of the thick book. It will be hard to find mint first editions of 1Q84 in a few years. (I wonder how those complainers will feel when they get home and find the glaring typo on the very first page of the book. That's a disappointing stumble at the beginning of a long journey.) Elliott Bay sold about ninety copies. The store was almost empty by quarter after midnight. Murakami's fiction has been known to overtly affect the dreams of his readers; lots of people were going to be sharing the same psychic space that night. Which brings me to my next point:

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