‘The Fog Kingdom’
3rd March 2013
Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.
Which is one of the reasons I own stock in the company. They make my life (and the lives of a lot of other people) much easier.
Evidently this puzzles some people. Like Walmart, Amazon is one of the favorite whipping boys of the Voices of the Crust and their politically activist cousins, who would much rather reduce American shopping to the era of The Music Man, where the epitome of modern times was riding your Model T Ford to the county seat. Cheap prices that help the poor stretch their dollars? What’s up with that?
“Everything about them,” said one indie publisher of Amazon in a Salon article, “is still evil.” But that view is countered by people like Will Wiles, who took to the Huffington Post to describe the process of publishing his novel, Care of Wooden Floors, with New Harvest. “Ascendant companies always seem most threatening,” he wrote, “at the moment when they’re becoming indispensable parts of the scenery of an industry.” He had reason to show his loyalty, of course. But consider: When he was promoting his book after the birth of a child, Amazon did something that few publishers would. They sent him a box of diapers.
And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Amazon — and its critics.