I was chatting with Claude about working in a chain bookstore in 1990. It was not a marketplace of ideas. Ideas were seriously underrepresented. The shelves, to be honest, were loaded with garbage. I could see Amazon coming twenty years down the road.
I could see why Jeff Bezos chose to start e-commerce with a bookstore. Textbooks are a lucrative business and any reasonable selection of titles would, and did, sink the chains' ship. It generated a tremendous amount of goodwill in breaking the publishing/bookstore stranglehold among people truly aware of the situation.
I love Amazon's backlist. For $1.99 I can download any number of serious, time tested authors, kick back with a mocha and my smartphone and read. We are now rationally privileged beyond the wildest imaginings of sixty years ago although barely surviving the irrational excesses of the television set still.
I see no need to disrupt the book reviews, The London Review, The New York Review. In fact we need more of them with more generalist reviewers to help pick our way through this newly accessible jungle of literature and ideas.
Do Well and Be Well
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