《George Packer_ Is Amazon Bad for Books_ _ The New Yorker》.pdf

A REPORTER AT LARGE CHEAP WORDS Amazon is g ood f or customers. But is it g ood f or books ? by George Packer FEBRUARY 17, 20 14 Print More Share Close Reddit Linked In Email StumbleUpon In the era of the Kindle, a book costs the same price as a sandw ich. Dennis Johnson, an independent publisher, says that “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value—it ’s a w idget.” Construction by Ian Wright. Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It ’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P .S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a maj or newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer . After Apple launched the iPod, Steve Jobs didn’t sign up pop stars for recording contracts. A.T. T. doesn’t build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.). Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating. Bezos originally thought of calling his company R—that U.R.L. still takes you to Amazon’s site—before adopting the name of the world’s largest river by volume. (If Bezos were a reader of classic American fiction, he might have hit upon O.) Amazon’s shape-shifting, engulfing quality, its tentacles extending in all directions, makes it unusual even in the tech industry, where