Fleeing Amazonia

When I first heard about it in 1994 I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I considered its founder, Jeffrey Jorgensen––a person who goes by a different name today––to be a visionary. His company, originating in Seattle, started small and grew from there, the classic American-Dream story. What's not to love?

Book buying had always been serious business for me, going back to my Cleveland days when I used to burn hours at Coventry Books. When I moved to Denver it was all about the Tattered Cover, that tome-lined parlor with its cushy chairs, inviting you to spend the day. Then after we relocated to New York City there was A Different Light, Gotham, The Strand, Three Lives, and many more that I loved and practically lived in, too many to mention, including Barnes and Noble ultimately, the new kid on the block. 

Its entry in the city put New Yorkers on notice, namely that their beloved haunts were henceforth vulnerable, just biding time 'til the end, including my fav, Astor Place Books, owned and operated by the oldest and crankiest seller in the city. The most knowledgeable too. There was nothing I couldn't get there, no matter how obscure, and when it succumbed I was crushed; I wondered what in the world would replace it given the B&N branch nearby had only an OK selection, one that in my view skewed too much toward the popular. 

What attracted me to the new, online option in '94 was the depth of the collection––it still amazes me––that and the fact it wasn't B&N, the bully that buried my favorite shops. For many years Amazon failed to turn a profit. It attracted investors, but only moneybags who could absorb the loss if it went belly-up. Buying from Amazon you had the sense you were helping Jeff actualize a worthy dream; that and turn a dime. It would be years still until he bought up the world; before he made not just book-buying but living too, too easy, albeit at a cost. Such that nowadays whether we like it or not we all inhabit Amazonia. 

The drumbeat against it has been driven by the company's exploitive work ethic, its union-busting practices and thugish attitude toward competition. It ate up Abe Books, Whole Foods, The Washington Post, MGM, and over ninety other companies, such that there are two major lawsuits against it at the moment for monopolizing several markets.

Jeff went from a regular guy struggling to make a go of it to a billionaire cozying up to a felon––possibly for a break on the lawsuits? My many purchases over the years helped create that monster, apparently, though I'd argue it wasn't a foregone conclusion. Jeff Jorgensen could have remained Jeff Jorgensen and not another tech-sycophant trying to garner favor with the powerful. He could have been satisfied with what he had––he could have stuck with DEI. With endorsing a candidate who isn't a felon. 

Now people are fleeing billionaire-run companies in droves, myself included. The effort has left me with one less newspaper to read and scrambling more than ever to find a bookseller. As for my local brick-and-mortar shops, forget about it; they're more for book tourists than serious readers. How could they survive in this country otherwise? People are quick to suggest Bookshop, and it even touts itself as the anti-Amazon, though there are problems there too. Recently I set out to purchase Elaine Pagels' forthcoming, Miracles and Wonders, which with tax on Amazon costs $22.45; I went with Bookshop instead and paid a whopping $34.08, almost twelve dollars more. Doing so afforded me a sense of moral correctness, for adding to the $37,000,000 that Bookshop brags about passing on to brick-and-mortar stores nearby, the very ones in which I can barely find a book I want to read. 

Among all the online vendors, virtuous as they try to paint themselves compared to Amazon, it's clear they're in it for the money––the Paul Newman Brand of booksellers they ain't, and how can you blame them given the market? So the question remains, What's an ethically-minded book nerd to do? (Full disclosure: my own novels are available on Amazon, which is the biggest peddler of not just my but every author's works). There are libraries for sure, and I use them when I can, though really what I'd need is something akin to the Main NYC Branch, the one with the lions guarding the gates; that is a research library, something that doesn't exist here in the southwest. 

There's a benefit these days to being a bibliophobe; a non- or easy-reader, of light fare picked up on a browsing or scrolled through on a tablet. For geeks like me though, amassing a personal library is a necessity, not to mention one of life's great pleasures. I know I'm not alone, that there are others out there passionate about actual, physical books of uncompromising substance, ones you want not just to hold but to interact with, doodle on, underline, and scribble notes to yourself in the margins. The problem is how and where to source them without losing your shirt or the ability to look yourself in the mirror at night.

In J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello we're presented with a professor who upon retirement is asked to give a farewell address to her colleagues. She explains that she's been a vegetarian for years, but that despite her efforts to do the least harm to humans, and animals too, her handbag is made of leather, as well as her shoes and belt, the point of which is there's no such thing as a good conscience among human animals. We can try, but there's no escaping a series of bad options simply in getting by. Finding a way out of the jungle, fleeing Amazonia and what it's come to represent, is not as easy as one might think.

In the best of all possible worlds Amazon would reform itself, grow both a heart and a soul; there's always the Paul Newman model. Barring that unlikely scenario the effort to find other options begs a concerted try, given we're past prime for a newer, kinder business model, beyond the current billionaire version of the gilded age and its modern robber barons.