Archive - March 12, 2014

[If you write books. If you read books. You might want to take a look at this long New Yorker piece by George Packer (Togo 1982-83)] CHEAP WORDS Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books? BY George Packer February 17,2014 Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business. Sam Walton wanted merely to be the world’s biggest retailer. After Apple launched the . . .