Longreads

Ian McKellen in the Grapes, the pub he co-owns: “I’m on the side of people trying to make this world a better place,” he says. Photograph: Pal Hansen for the Observer It's not quite a hole in the…

1. Wasserman The Amazon Effect Amazon got big fast, hastening the arrival of digital publishing. But how big is too big? Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, served as…

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the cloudremote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and…

Jeff Bezos is channeling Steve Jobs. It’s mid-September and the wiry billionaire founder of Amazon.com is at his brand new corporate headquarters in Seattle, in a building named “Day One South” after his conviction that 17-year-old Amazon is still in its infancy. Almost giddy with excitement, Bezos retrieves one by one the new crop of dirt-cheap Kindle e-readers—they start at $79—from a hidden perch on a chair tucked into a conference room table. When he’s done showing them off, he stands up, and, for an audience of a single journalist, announces, “Now, I’ve got one more thing to show you.” He waits a half-beat to make sure the reference to Jobs’ famous line from Apple presentations hasn’t been missed, then gives his notorious barking laugh. With that, Bezos pulls out the Kindle Fire, Amazon’s long-anticipated tablet computer—and the first credible response to the Apple iPad.