There’s the predatory pricing-a loss leader strategy (cheap goods, quickly delivered) that decimates small businesses, to the tune of at least one bookstore closure every week in 2020, a year in which book sales overall actually rose. In accessible prose, he sets out a head-spinning list of Amazon's abuses-it turns out that stealing the name of an endangered planetary wonder is the least of it. But this only makes him “biased” if you think caring about your community is a bias. Caine owns The Raven, an indie bookstore in Kansas-exactly the sort of establishment Amazon seems engineered to destroy. Should any company be that large, wealthy, and ubiquitous? Obviously not, Danny Caine persuasively answers in How To Resist Amazon and Why (just out from Microcosm Publishing). You’ve probably already used faux Amazon in some capacity several times today, but its namesake has been burning for decades, a canary in the climate-change coalmine that most of us have grown to ignore-at least in part because when we hear the word “Amazon,” disappearing rainforest is no longer the first thing we think of. To a book-addicted twentysomething on a teaching assistant’s budget, Amazon seemed heaven-sent. It might’ve been a devilish twinkle, now that I think about it. The site had existed for a few years by then.)
One of my classmates, with a twinkle in his eye that I wasn’t sure how to interpret, pointed us to this new thing on the web.
In a seminar, we were discussing the reading list, some of which couldn’t be accessed at the USC bookstore. The first time I heard of Amazon was in grad school, in the late nineties.
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