Amazon’s buyout of Goodreads has a lot of people curling their lips in disgust, and Rumpus columnist Steve Almond is among them: “As a reader and writer I find all this pretty despicable.”
But it’s worth zooming out and looking at the buyout’s context: industry-wide changes to publishing’s traditional (and deeply dysfunctional) business practices. Says Almond,
I couldn’t help but think of the state of publishing in evolutionary terms: the lumbering dinosaurs were dying out, but in their wake all these industrious little mammals were thriving.
Read the whole thing here for a little peace of mind.
