As the NSA spying scandal lumbers along, or as some reports suggest, begins, reports of American apathy have already rolled in. Of course, those supposed indifferent shrugs tend to amount more to how the questions are being asked than actual viewpoints. Couple that with how social humans are as a species, is in my opinion quite dangerous. It'd be all too easy for people to hear reports that nobody really seems to care about any of this intrusive data gathering business and decide that they should feel similarly.

Fortunately, there's at least some evidence that such an effect isn't occurring. Otherwise, we're going to have to come up with a whole new logical reason as to why George Orwell's books, particularly 1984, are skyrocketing up the hot sellers lists. As Gawker notes:

According to Amazon's Movers & Shakers countdown, three different editions of George Orwell's alt-history book Nineteen Eighty-Four have shot up hundreds of spots on the chart since news of the NSA's clandestine spying program PRISM broke late last week. One edition in particular — the Centennial Edition — has exploded in popularity, increasing its sales rank by 7,000% in days.

Now, before you cheer this on, it's worth noting that other books on the "Movers and Shakers" list aren't so politically-minded, unless books on being a gentleman (pshhh!), books on calorie counting (pshhh!), or books by Glenn Beck (PSHHH!) actually have some value there that I'm not aware of. Still, it's encouraging to see signs that people are paying attention. That, after all, is how change actually occurs. I might suggest some lovely texts by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine as well, but Orwell is certainly a start.

The year 1984 didn't quite turn out the way the book did, but we're already living in a world where there are ubiquitous cameras tracking our every move. But it's not necessarily the government behind the cameras -- a lot of cameras are for private security and... possibly advertisers. Here are a few stories that might make you want to dress up like the Unabomber when you go out.

• A billboard at a London bus stop determines (or tries to) people's gender and present ads accordingly. The system apparently is about 90% accurate, and it doesn't apologize for its mistakes. [url]
• Eyetracking billboards haven't exactly caught on, but the technology exists with cameras that can tell when your retinas are aligned for optimal ad delivery. If these eye-trackers do catch on, there might be a new market of ad-blocking sunglasses... [url]
• Immersive Labs has a prototype ad system that tries to personalize and target its promotions using a collection of software tools that include face recognition and machine learning to figure out the demographics of its audience. The creators of this system say their product will only deliver the ads that people want to see. [Ahem.] [url]
• To discover more interesting advertising-related content, check out what's floating around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

One of the recurring themes around here is that advertising should be engaging and entertaining, not annoying. Every year, there are excellent examples of this truism -- during the halftime of the Superbowl. Some ads are easily forgotten, but some are remembered for decades (and even associated with the products they were trying to promote). Here are just a few more reminders, just in case you're busy this coming Sunday.

• Apple's classic "1984" superbowl ad seems to be one of the few things remembered from that game's advertising. Who are the "drones" now? [url]
• The Sausage King of Chicago is back selling Japanese-made SUVs. Save Ferris! [url]
• Freaking people out with (fake) flying people in the skies of NYC... is supposed to get people to watch a movie? Possibly viral? Check. Is this obviously connected to the product being advertised? Uh... [url]
• To discover more interesting advertising-related content, check out what's floating around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

For quite some time we've been pointing out the simple fact that, unlike with a physical book, you don't really own the ebooks that you buy on your Amazon Kindle. Even worse, Amazon can simply delete them at will. In fact, that's exactly what's happened to (of all books!) George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. Talk about irony. People who legitimately purchased those books discovered that they're now gone, as the publisher has decided that ebook versions were doubleplusungood and should never have existed in the first place. So, like the war with Eurasia, the book is now just a figment of your imagination. You never had it. At least Amazon refunded the money, but what kind of book do you buy that gets automatically disappeared? eBooks are an interesting concept, but how can anyone buy into something where their books might suddenly disappear? Update: The NY Times is now reporting that Amazon says it will change its system so that, in the future, books won't be deleted. However, that's not making many customers happy. They seem pretty pissed off -- with some noting that Amazon's own terms of service claim that you have a permanent right to the content once you've bought it. On top of that, the Times quotes a student who had taken a bunch of notes, which Amazon destroyed as well.