Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Is Amazon the Devil?
I have often bought from my local independent bookstore when I could have purchased from Amazon at a lower price (though not as much as I should have). The pressures on independent booksellers are enormous, and I hope my local bookseller can stay in business. It never occurred to me that when purchasing on line I should avoid Amazon where possible as well (though I have purchased books from Powell's, the Seminary Co-op, and Barnes and Nobles). I should have been purchasing from Powell's and the Seminary Co-op on principle when not supporting my local store because they are two of the best independent bookstores in the country as well as online sellers.
But I did not realize the nature of the sharp practices engaged in by Amazon, practices that have threatened publishers in serious ways. Many a publisher has been pressured to give higher discounts to Amazon in high-handed scurrilous ways. If I had known of this behavior, I would previously have been scurrying for alternatives to purchasing from this ethically impoverished institution. For an eye-opening study of the business practices employed by Amazon and the practices that will likely follow given the arbitrary pricing of e-books, see the Boston Review.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/12/is-amazon-the-devil.html
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Something bugs me about this -- it seems to be a fight between the rich and the super-rich -- and I think it was made clear to me by the closing line in the piece:
"Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup."
There's a conceit there that it would be OK if Amazon implemented the same practices for things like cans of soup. That the fruit of a writer's labor is somehow different from the fruits of other labor. If Wal-Mart demands prices for clothes that all but require their suppliers use offshore sweatshop labor, we can deal with that, but how dare they cut into publishers' margins!
It reminds me of people who weren't upset about the various things the government was doing in the War on Terror until they themselves had their privacy encroached by the new TSA scans and pat-downs.
I guess I leave unconvinced that Amazon is particularly evil, just that they happen to be the drivers as the publishing industry goes through an inevitable transition that will certainly have its share of victims. It's not Craigslists' fault that the market for print journalism is collapsing; I'm not sure it's Wal-Mart or Home Depot's fault that the corner store is a thing of the past.
What is true is that these companies have inherited a tremendous power that they are responsible to exercise good stewardship over, and we can judge them on how they do that. And our knowledge of Original Sin should make us wary of concentrating this power into too few hands.