For Your Consideration

This is offered for your considertion. I will leave out my own comments and snarkiness.

Below is a quote directly from this mornings reading of Shelf Awareness. It is a discussion of a very interesting article in The New Yorker by George Packer entitled, "Cheap Words." You can find a link to the article here. The editors at Shelf Awareness  have this to say:

Another "former Amazon employee" who worked in the Kindle division said, Packer writes, "that few of his colleagues in Seattle had a real interest in books: 'You never heard people say, 'Hey, what are you reading?' Everyone there is so engineering-oriented. They don't know how to talk to novelists.' "

Packer doesn't talk much about alternatives to Amazon, including independent booksellers, Barnes & Noble or nonbook retailers who sell books, saying that publishers' "long-term outlook is discouraging. This is partly because Americans don't read as many books as they used to--they are too busy doing other things with their devices--but also because of the relentless downward pressure on prices that Amazon enforces. The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich. 'Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,' [Dennis] Johnson said. 'It's a widget.' "

Packer quotes a literary agent saying that book world trends are leading to " 'the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer.' A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy."

Packer concludes: "Bezos is right: gatekeepers are inherently élitist, and some of them have been weakened, in no small part, because of their complacency and short-term thinking. But gatekeepers are also barriers against the complete commercialization of ideas, allowing new talent the time to develop and learn to tell difficult truths. When the last gatekeeper but one is gone, will Amazon care whether a book is any good?"