A Website on the U.S. Trade Policy Disaster || UNSUSTAINABLE.org


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	About Eamonn Fingleton Author of In the Jaws of the Dragon; Unsustainable; In Praise of Hard Industries; Blindside; and the Penguin Money Book

	Thirty Years of Prescience A retrospective on Fingleton's record as a commentator

	About In the Jaws of the Dragon A 2008 book in which Fingleton challenges the Washington view that China is converging to Western values

	About In Praise of Hard Industries Published in 1999 and subtitled Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity, this was Fingleton's challenge to America's exaggerated hopes for the New Economy

	About Blindside Fingleton's controversial 1995 book on why the Japanese economic system is not capitalism -- and how "basket case" Japan secretly seized the lead in advanced manufacturing when Washington wasn't looking

	About Unsustainable.org Named for the headline over an article Fingleton published in the American Prospect in 2000, Unsustainable.org was founded in 2001 as the Internet's first site on America's trade disaster

	Amazon.com on Hard Industries Amazon's business editor named Hard Industries one of the ten best books of 1999

	**Business Week on Blindside** One of the best books of the year

	Finding Fingleton's Books Navigating Amazon's problematical catalog

	中文 [For Chinese Speakers] 冯艾盟先生简介。。。馮艾盟先生簡介

	日本語 [For Japanese Speakers] エーモン・フィングルトン略歴

	Links

	Archives 2001--2007

Jaws: A Note for Books Editors and Reviewers

By Eamonn Fingleton

The prescience of my previous book In Praise of Hard Industries is a major asset for me in asking for a hearing for the rather controversial analysis in In the Jaws of the Dragon. Unfortunately Hard Industries is almost unfindable at Amazon.

Specifically the links between Amazon's Jaws page and the Hard Industries page are broken. In other words anyone who starts at the Jaws page and clicks on the links cannot find Hard Industries. If people click on the author name at the Jaws page they are brought to a menu page that ostensibly includes a link to one used copy of Hard Industries. But clicking on this item leads to a page for a completely different book (Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee). Moreover the menu page misstates the date of publication of Hard Industries as June 2001, whereas the true date was September 1999. This is crucial because the misdating obscures the fact that Hard Industries anticipated the dot.com crash of 2000. (So far as I am aware Hard Industries shares this distinction with only one other book, Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil).

A page for Hard Industries, complete with correctly stated publication date, still exists at Amazon but is findable only in response to a search by the book's full 17-word title. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/Praise-Hard-Industries-Manufacturing-Information/dp/0395899680/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204209584&sr=1-2

Repeated efforts to get Amazon to correct the problems have drawn a blank. It is fair to say that the Amazon catalog department has become increasingly unreliable and unresponsive since it was outsourced some years ago to India. I would add that when the Jaws page first went up at Amazon the links to Hard Industries functioned fine. It was only after I succeeded in getting Amazon to delete a highly malicious "customer" review of Hard Industries (by one Dianne Roberts, whose activities I discuss elsewhere at this site -- see "Piranhas in the Amazon System" ) that the links were broken and the highly tendentious misstating of the book's publication date appeared.

While it is true that we live in the age of information, Amazon customers need to be aware that not all the information presented to them by even America's most prestigious corporations is reliable or politically neutral.