This week has seen a lot of Amazon talk around the Internet. After Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed on Amazon’s predatory practices, Farhad Manjoo responded at Slate, arguing against independent booksellers. Russo continued the conversation yesterday with an open letter to Manjoo, nudging the discussion towards an examination of “the true costs of what we purchase.”
“Thanks to technology, we have interesting questions to ask ourselves about what we’ll buy this year, and where and why. Our job, Mr. Manjoo’s and mine, is not so much to answer those questions as to articulate them clearly.”
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Whenever I think of Amazon, or hear some conservative economist glowing over the cheap goods that result from sending all our manufacturing overseas, I remember the title of that Wal-Mart documentary: the high cost of low prices. Nothing is free, and somebody has to bear the cost – in the case of Amazon and books, it’s the artist/creators of the very product that Amazon has gotten rich off of. But keep squeezing those artists, and eventually the supply line will be shut off.
A good independent bookstore’s recommendations are worth paying attention to, because they come from people who care deeply about books. Even if a good independent bookstore’s selection is small, it is curated; you may not walk out with a particular book you wanted, but you are likely to walk out with something interesting. An algorithm like Amazon’s can tell you that people who like Borges also like Cortázar, which is something, but isn’t everything.
When I’ve shopped at Amazon, I’ve found great deals on popular books, and I’ve found authors who are a lot like other authors I like. What I have not been is surprised.
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