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.”