Amazon vs. The Shop Around the Corner

Richard Russo attempts to right the misinformation being spread after Amazon's holiday price-check debacle writing in the New York Times that books in fact were not included in the site's discount, should you take them up on hunting down small businesses. To be clear:

Books, interestingly enough, were excluded, but you could use your Amazon credit online to buy other things that bookstores sell these days, like music and DVDs. And, if you were scanning, say, the new Steve Jobs biography, you’d no doubt be informed that you were about to pay way too much. I wondered what my writer friends made of all this, so I dashed off an e-mail to Scott Turow, the president of the Authors Guild, and cc’ed Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Andre Dubus III, Anita Shreve, Tom Perrotta and Ann Patchett.

These writers all derive considerable income from Amazon’s book sales. But when the responses to my query started coming in it was clear Amazon’s program would find no defenders in our ranks.

And true enough, Tom Perrotta told Russo that there are other factors to consider: “People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.”

But some writers disagree. Daniel Nester tweeted today: "Collective hysteria of aspirational authors over Slate indie bookstore article makes me jump on pro-@fmanjoo train. #goahead #unfollowme" and, later, "The Russo article? Lazy, disingenuous, an easy target. Indie bookstores aren't charities. Publishers make money. We're talking aesthetics." The article in question was authored by Farhad Manjoo at Slate:

But as I waded into Russo’s piece—which was widely passed around on Tuesday—I realized that he’d made a critical and common mistake in his argument. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. With his creepy laugh and Dr. Evil smile, Bezos is an easy guy to hate, and I’ve previously worried that he’d ruin the book industry. But if you’re a novelist—not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry—you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner.

Manjoo backs himself up with all sorts of hard-to-read sentences. The comment section at Slate is all lit up--what do you think?

Oh and meanwhile, we've been alerted to a Tumblr someone has created to serve as "[a]n online archive to educate consumers about the problems and politics of doing business with the beast."