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How Amazon has Changed Literature for the Worse

The last time I ordered something from Amazon was 2020. I spent an hour online looking for vacuum cleaner filters anywhere else. I was left only with the option of buying them from Amazon or jumping into my car and store-hopping until I got lucky. Not wanting to lose more of my day, I bit the bullet and hit Add to Cart. A quick look at my Amazon account reveals in 2017 I bought from them a digital clock and some earplugs. This has to have been the result of a gift card. You get a card as a gift, and what else are you going to do with it? To want to avoid any store for which you have free money is too precious, even for me. I still love that clock.

Yes, I have a prejudice against the online superstore, and it mirrors a tendency I’ve had since I was an adolescent. Back then, it was McDonald’s. In the 90s, it was Starbucks. In the early 2000s, Walmart. It surfaces when I feel like some company is trying to take all of the business from everybody else. I suspect deeply—despite all evidence to the contrary—that such aggressive competition is not good for the overall economy, or for the morale of people (“How am I supposed to compete with that?”), and I set myself up as someone who doesn’t patronize these places, except apparently when they offer to sell me something I can’t get anywhere else, or if someone gives me a gift card for them. I also remember a trip to Walmart during the early 2000s to buy toilet paper appropriate for RV commodes. That was a tough day.

Amazon is different for me from the others because while I’ve consumed my share of hamburgers, coffee, and toilet paper, book culture is something I hold close to my heart. This is where I get what I consider genuine human wisdom from the world. It’s the avenue of entertainment I consider myself least susceptible to its addictive qualities. It’s the artistic mode through which some of the most sacred aspects of people come to me. For the moment, books still boast the capacity for a kind of private experience that eliminates the intrusion of others, and I can take in smart, preferably wise points of view over long periods and thereby give them the consideration they deserve. Books do this for me. Nothing else does as much. I can walk down the street, buy a copy of whatever, bring it home, sit here, read it, and that’s as good as art gets for me.

Amazon’s influence on this practice is multi-faceted, and much of that influence is good. It’s impossible for me—a self-publisher going back 20 years—to ignore the positive impact of Amazon and it’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform on the form. Through KDP, writers can and do communicate book-length works directly with audiences, and the impact on expanding contemporary selection beyond what traditional publishing is willing offer has been fantastic. Books of every stripe have found homes in this realm, and many have broken new ground for the wider publishing industry. A hundred years from now, when experts talk about the publishing world of today, they won’t talk about anything happening in the traditional industry. They’ll talk about Amazon, self-publishing, KDP, and the Amazon fundraising tool Kickstarter. I’ve used all of the above to help advance my cause as a writer, and they work like they say they do. Any publishing agent that wants insight into burgeoning book markets has to have one ear trained toward what’s happening at Amazon. It’s where the magic is right now, the new biofuel to makes the traditional publishing machine evolve.

Never willing to let any aspect of the industry go unchallenged, Amazon also boasts a traditional publishing arm that has made happy a range of authors who were selected to publish with one of their imprints. Writers such as Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, Neal Pollack, and Rebecca Kelley have all signed with Amazon, skipping conventional houses and going with the main generator of books sales in contemporary publishing. Every report I’ve heard about how Amazon treats and pays these authors has been glowing. I have no doubt many fiction writers now see Amazon as their preferred option for publishing their work, or if they don’t, they probably should.

That said, Amazon has been undeniably bad for segments of our culture, and segments I care deeply about. There are no doubt folks who can expound on the environmental degradation caused by the superstore, or on its union-busting practices. I’ll focus instead on the effects of the company on book culture. As one example, Amazon has virtually single-handedly run most mom-and-pop bookstores in the country out of business, and now they’re out to run mom-and-pop everything out of business. If you ever look around and find contemporary life devoid of meaning, there’s plenty to blame. Just don’t forget to blame that steel-grey delivery truck that is no doubt driving on a street near you at this moment.

As much as I’ve complained about Amazon over the years, I respect the company’s willingness to offer better platforms for writers and to take chances creatively. No doubt many novelists have careers today due primarily to Amazon. Sometimes it feels like the only genuinely positive things happening in publishing are happening at the superstore. As someone who will exhaust every other avenue besides Amazon to buy anything, it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge their contribution to the expanded offerings of contemporary publishing. They give authors a chance who otherwise might not have one, and they pay them comparatively well. Those are things I can always get behind.

What I can’t get behind is the way Amazon has changed the nature of writers, readers, and booksellers.

When I started reading novels in the 1980s, the business of publishing struck me as barely worth mentioning. I sometimes got new paperback versions of books for ten or 12 dollars, but more typically I found them used for a dollar or two, maybe five or six dollars for a newer edition of one in particularly good condition. Despite being a minimum wage worker and college student from a less-than-affluent background, no reading experience was ever denied me. If I wanted to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Awakening or A Clockwork Orange, for a few dollars, I could have a copy in my hand within the hour. If I’d thought about it, I would’ve seen this era as an unbelievably privileged time to be a reader, but I didn’t think about it enough even to be glad about it. I was young. It was simply part of our culture.

In effect, publishing at the time struck me as a nebulous business model. I don’t doubt it made money, but from my perhaps naïve point of view, its role supplying readers with great books, no matter their social strata, was more important than that. Cheap new and used works of recently published paperbacks and bygone classics were readily available to virtually anyone who wanted to try them, but there was a catch. You read what was there.

There were plenty of books in the world of literature to choose from, but not an endless supply of storylines. Does an adventure about a crazed 19th century ship captain chasing a whale interest you? Or how about a Black woman escaping slavery with her children? There’s also one about a fighter pilot in World War II who’s trying to get out of the war, and one about a dystopian future where one man tries desperately to hang onto his freedom. As important as some of these subjects might be, I didn’t know if I wanted to read a book about any of them. What I knew was that I wanted to read great literature, and great literature happened to come in a range of stories—but not an endless supply of them. In short, if you wanted to read something that was great, there was a good chance it was on a topic you found only mildly interesting. For me, it wasn’t about the topic. It was about the approach to the topic: the writing. That’s what it meant to me to be a good reader. You read the people who were great writers, and you more or less took what they had to offer story-wise.

I’m sure such an attitude places me in the minority of readers now, if it didn’t then. The contemporary reader is pickier than they used to be. More than ever, they want books on certain topics that follow somewhat predictable conventions and end in a certain way. For example, the list of genres has grown substantially over the past 30 years. I think most people of a certain age can run down the typical fiction genres from, say, 1985: romance, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, western, literary. I can see all of these words backlit along the tops of the shelves of the Waldenbooks in the mall where I grew up—a store, for the record, I spent very little time in. There was also erotica, which most definitely did not have its own section at my local Waldenbooks. I also vaguely remember a Christian section at the store, but I’m not sure if it contained fiction or not. There may have been a few more genres I’m forgetting, but not many more. If you could name a dozen from back then, a few of them might be new to me.

Of course, people have bought books in specific genres for centuries, but the number of fiction genres to choose from is now uncountable. In his nonfiction work Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, Mark McGurl discusses the genre LitRPG, which boasts as its most successful example 2011’s Ready Player One. Since the publication of this book, we now have Dmitry Rus’s Alterworld series, about a cancer patient whose consciousness is uploaded to a multiplayer online roleplaying game. We also have Aleron Kong’s Chaos Seeds series, about a multiplayer online roleplaying game called “The Land” that is also a pocket universe. There’s also The Way of the Shaman series by Vasily Mahanenko, a story about computer hackers forced to work in labor camps for a nefarious corporate entity. Each of these titles was originally brought to the public through KDP, and now the burgeoning genre boasts an expanded legion of fans. I don’t have sales figures. Those are closely guarded by Amazon and the rest of the industry. From what I can see online, I don’t doubt these authors do well.

If you’re not into the whole LitRPG thing, McGurl chronicles how virtually any large-selling work of the past couple of decades has since yielded its own genre. Self-pub success story Amanda Hocking picked up on the premise of the Twilight series and ran with it, giving her fans KDP-published vampire romance stories until the conventional industry gave her millions to do it for them. The massive success of Fifty Shades of Grey led to the self-published Alpha series by Jasinda Wilder, in which a woman struggling with bills finds $10,000 checks in her mailbox and hot sex with a billionaire down the line. There’s the Loving the White Billionaire series by Monica Brooks, in which a Black woman finds sexual and life satisfaction with a monied man of a different race. Further down this path, McGurl describes any number of sub-subgenres that link genre fiction with porn, with titles such as Space Raptor Butt Invasion, Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls, and Slammed in the Butt by the Prehistoric Megalodon Shark amidst Accusations of Jumping over Him. I have no idea how many readers these works boast. I offer the titles for a giggle, and as proof that anything can get published through KDP, and does.

What’s the result of all of these specific genres? What could possibly be my problem with people getting precisely the types of plots and characters they crave from their fiction? I’m not claiming the phenomenon is all bad. What I don’t like is that this emphasis on genre has usurped the specialness of what can happen when reading books. I think of all the times, back in the day, someone came to me with a book and said, “It’s about [fill in the blank], but don’t worry about that. Just read it.” That’s the kind of reading experience I’m looking for, and that’s the kind of experience that Amazon can’t quantify.

My favorite novels in the world have been about, for example, a man who travels through time during World War II, killers in the 19^th century American West, a poor southern family in the 1920s transporting their mother to be buried, an American military man who falls in love during World War I, an American man in the 1950s looking to escape his domestic life, a Frenchman explaining the nature of time, a weird Columbian town, a Black girl who wants blue eyes. I have never once searched out a book about any of these topics. On the surface of plot, I don’t care about any of them. That’s not why I read them.

But that’s not the experience Amazon facilitates. It places the emphasis on a fiction characteristic its algorithm can handle: What is the genre of the work? Then it spends all of its time convincing you the reader that genre is really what you want, not some transcendent experience it can’t understand. Genre is the thing, as a business, it can get its teeth into, and then it uses genre to get its teeth into you.

In such a publishing world, career-minded authors takes note. As Mark McGurl writes, “What is an author? For Amazon, authors should consider themselves a kind of entrepreneur or service provider. They are the opposite of the aloof or absent modernist god who, in James Joyce’s telling, recedes from his work to pare his fingernails, letting the reader make of it what she will. If they come to seem godlike all the same, that will be because of their transcendent sales.” Whether authors continue to be dispensers of wisdom is neither here nor there to Amazon. The company just needs you to click the Buy It Now button. This change in emphasis trickles down to all book authors who care about sales. If that’s what you want, be prepared to play the game of genre.

So, who or what becomes the transcendent one in this new publishing world order? You’ll never guess. “[T]he relation of Amazon to fiction, to story,” McGurl writes, “is more than one of convenience, going to the core of its corporate identity. So much so that we might think of the company not only as the protagonist of contemporary literary life but as its most emblematic ‘author,’ as deserving in its way of lending its name to the literary period in which it appears as Samuel Johnson was of the Age of Johnson … or Ezra Pound was of the Pound era…. Which is to say, only debatably deserving of the honor, but not implausibly so, and helpful in bringing certain phenomena to our attention.” So, great authors are no longer great. Why? Because Amazon gets all the oxygen in that room. They’re the star of this screenplay they’re writing. Everyone else—Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Angelou—are just secondary characters.

This insight reminds me of one of my previously published pieces on Amazon about 10 years ago—no longer available on the web—in which I discuss the company’s truncation of a quote from Orwell to suit its needs of the moment, which happened to be its conflict with traditional houses about the price of ebooks. Even the work of Orwell is worth flipping on its head if it advances the company’s cause. As I wrote at the time: I care more about Orwell than I do about any publishing apparatus, and certainly more than I care about Amazon. Before Amazon, I sensed that all of publishing cared more about Orwell than selling books. Perhaps I was naïve, but nothing is sacred in the online behemoth’s quest to become the everything store.

Such an elephant in the room is bad for me as a reader and bad for great writing in general. Most importantly, it takes power out of the hands of the one group of people I read fiction to engage with—people like George Orwell—and gives it to Amazon. No longer is there an industry simply waiting for the next world-changing writer to drop their words on us so we can read them. The power dynamic has shifted from the writer to this company, which reinforces its position by cultivating its desired customer. “What is a reader?” McGurl writes. “Amazon sees them as a customer with needs, above all a need for reliable sources of comfort …. The reader-customer is looking for various things from a novel, no doubt, but all of them can from this perspective be assimilated to a program of self-care, of informal bibliotherapy or, leaning hard into the crisscrossing etymology of selling and telling, retail therapy.” This new customer is, now more than ever, not waiting around for great words from on high that might nourish them for the long term. They need what they need and they need it now. Writers who want to make a living jump through hoops to supply the Amazon customer with the product they crave, and Amazon serves as the ultra-reliable Man on the Corner, always there for you.

There are millions of reasons for this shift in culture, all of which don’t require the blame of Amazon, but none of the reasons are good enough for me to sit back and watch this portion of literary culture diminish. Without it, the world of fiction becomes not a unique path to understand humanity but a kind of proving ground for what books successfully satisfy the jones of customers. These are the books in the industry that get pushed. They tend to be the books that get TV, movie, and international deals, thus further disseminating and validating Amazon’s approach. Its influence has penetrated every aspect of the industry.

Of course, Amazon didn’t invent this kind of capitalism—though I’m sure they’d like you to think so—but in book publishing, they have turned up this type of method to the point that it gets harder and harder to see book culture as that special place where we meet ourselves and our wisest humans, and easier to see it as a slightly more boring arm of the already monolithic entertainment apparatus. Entertainment is great. I’ve spent a lifetime being entertained, but entertainment doesn’t have to eat everything.

I’ve operated to this point in my reading life on the idea that the right books will find their way to me. That process seems drastically curtailed these days by the primary way writers disseminate their work. I’ve never doubted more the ability of any corporate entity to provide me with fiction worth reading. They don’t satisfy my desire to be communicated to in the way I’ve come to expect from past decades of fiction reading. I want something different than Amazon can provide, something deeper than the company seems capable of understanding.

And I still manage to find it. Over the years, I’ve pulled together a range of disparate communication modes that help keep me reading satisfying work. I have friends who recommend titles. I subscribe to a paper journal (N+1) that routinely offers good reviews and recommendations. I frequent two independent bookstores and take note of end-capped offerings. I read slowly, so I don’t need hundreds of titles a year to keep me engaged. From this rag-tag collection of people, places, and things, I always manage to have something new to read, and these books often deliver.

In truth, these new titles tend to be nonfiction. It’s where the creative energy of books exists for me these days. When I read fiction, I tend to fall back on the classics, trying to catch up on books I’ve managed to evade so far in my life. There are plenty of reasons for this phenomenon, but Amazon leads the charge against what matters most in my reading practice. Great books have been around for centuries. Amazon has been around for 30 years. I know where I’m putting my money.