How to Read Mueller Report on Kindle
The Irony of Mueller-Report Profiteering
Ebook promos and paperbacks of the special counsel's report encapsulate the investigation's theme: The government is for sale.
When the Justice Department releases Special Counsel Robert Mueller's written report this morning time, it volition exist published on the Special Counsel'south Part website. By federal police, it will exist placed in the public domain. That ways you'll be able to download the report for free to read on your calculator or smartphone, to print out, or to email to your friends who don't know where to find it.
That'due south non stopping Barnes & Noble, the bookseller, from offering its ain version of the Mueller report as a complimentary download on its Nook tablet-and-app ebook platform. "We've received strong demand from our customers for this report," Tim Mantel, the company's master merchandising officeholder said in a statement, "and want to brand it as easy every bit possible for them to admission it for gratis as before long equally possible."
Barnes & Noble is besides selling a print edition of the report, with an introduction by the famed ramble-law expert Alan Dershowitz. The paperback costs $9.20. If Dershowitz isn't your bag, don't worry, there will be other options. The Washington Post's edition, for sale on Amazon for $10.50, promises "exclusive analysis" past the paper's Pulitzer Prize–winning staff, a prospect that the book'due south publisher, Scribner, claims volition make the edition "the most complete and authoritative available."
This isn't anything new. The Post also added its analysis to an edition of Kenneth Starr's written report on the Bill Clinton investigation in 1998. But dorsum and so, many Americans weren't however online, and they certainly weren't glued to the internet similar today's citizenry. Ebook readers such as Kindles and Nooks didn't be. If you were lucky enough to have a brand-new 56k modem, downloading a big PDF could accept taken an hour.
Simply today your grandfather and your half-dozen-year-old both know how to find the study on laptops, tablets, and smartphones. And then when Barnes & Noble offers a free download of the written report, it'due south by and large taking advantage of the opportunity to market the Nook e-reader and app, a platform that many might have forgotten about entirely in light of the Amazon Kindle'south market share. Attention is a powerful force, and marketers know that huge barrels of the stuff volition exist focused on all things Mueller today. Might likewise take advantage of it. (Barnes & Noble declined to comment on the record.)
That's nothing new, either. With consumer attending fragmented across the internet's shrapnel, ad has become about hitting countless narrow targets, which are then aggregated into a assisting marketplace. So when something really does get a national or global miracle, alluring huge swaths of the population'due south collective eyeballs all at once, marketers chomp at the bit to take advantage.
Earlier this calendar week, Game of Thrones offered one such rare example. Improbably, the fantasy ballsy became an international awareness, making it a brawny mark for promotions and tie-ins. In that location were Game of Thrones Oreos. Duolingo, the naggy language-learning app, offered a course in High Valyrian. Adidas released a set of Ultraboost sneakers themed after the great houses of Westeros. The Mueller report is Game of Thrones for the real world—minus the dragons, only with all the political intrigue. It's no surprise brands want to take advantage of it.
So, of class, there'due south what comes side by side: In one case the written report is released, anyone is costless to utilise it for whatsoever purpose, including commercial use. That ways you can do whatever else you lot desire with the study—no copyright restrictions forestall you from making motivational posters, screen-printing T-shirts, or embroidering baseball game caps with excerpts. Y'all could as well marketplace your own impress-volume edition of the study to compete with the i Barnes & Noble is selling.
Only, of class, this isn't a prestige TV show; information technology's a years-long investigation into Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And dissimilar all the votive candles and Mueller Time T-shirts people made to stir up juju for Mueller indictments, this is the report itself nosotros're talking about. The terminate result of an investigation into the possible abuse of the highest U.Southward. office past a foreign power, cut apart and sold off for scrap.
The whole maneuver makes for a funny echo of the possible corruption the special counsel prepare out to investigate. Donald Trump's sometime national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents. The former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.
Even if the contents of the Mueller report don't snare the president for conspiracy with a foreign power, Trump has profited personally from his presidency anyway. His 2017 travel ban excluded nations where he has investments. A $60,000 Kuwaiti consular party was moved to the Trump International Hotel, reportedly due to political pressure. He makes frequent utilize of his organisation'south properties, including the Trump National Golf game Social club and Mar-a-Lago, spending millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. The initiation fees at Mar-a-Lago doubled to $200,000 afterward Trump'south election, signaling to some a direct intention to use the society as an dues for political access to the president.
Efforts similar these are abnormal at all-time and unconstitutional at worst. But they likewise represent an extreme version of the aforementioned logic that lets Barnes & Noble hawk its due east-reader app by means of the taxpayer-funded Mueller report. If the regime produces raw materials that citizens can exploit for profit if they choose, then why non take advantage of the opportunity? The analogy is a imitation one, of course—commercializing public-domain documents is non the aforementioned as profiting from public part in violation of the emoluments clause. But the spirit of the free ebook download risks advancing the same end, one in which the authorities is not a civic system that serves its people and asks naught in return, but just another resource to mine for profit.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/problem-free-mueller-report-ebook/587446/
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