Author: Andrew Sullivan

Julie Bosman reports (NYT) that book publishers are now “encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace”:

The practice of spacing an author’s books at least one year apart is gradually being discarded as publishers appeal to the same “must-know-now” impulse that drives binge viewing of shows like “House of Cards” and “Breaking Bad.”

Michelle Dean hopes binge-reading isn’t the new binge-watching:

The kind of trance that reading induces is qualitatively different from the experience of sitting down and watching 12 hours of television. This is true even if the television is really good, I think. It just uses a different part of your brain.

I’m aware that in a way I’m just quibbling with a label, with marketing, by saying I don’t think that “binge reading” is silly. But I just really, really don’t think this is a viable business model for imaginative work. Practically speaking, writing a “binge read” would mean writing entire epics on spec, all at once, before selling them. It also means that the slow accumulation of fans that something like Game of Thrones enjoyed would be a thing of the past. I don’t know: there’s just something about this whole idea that strikes me as the product of an industry feeling like the culture is accelerating away from it.

Gracy Olmstead considers the implications for libraries:

This scheme is an interesting study in venues and audiences. While Netflix may inspire the development, a book is different from a TV series, and a library different from an instant-watch website. With the caveat that writers’ style and quality should not suffer (due to the pressure of speed), it’s not a bad thing to release books in quick succession. It seems a wise and marketable scheme. But while all-at-once rollout may foster book buys, it may favor online sales over library or bookstore visits. If you want to buy the next book in your teen vampire series, will you wait for your local library to buy the latest copy—or will you grab the Kindle edition from Amazon? Netflix has drawn audiences away from the traditional television by offering endless hours of entertainment without the hassle. An onslaught of binge-targeted titles may have a similar effect on libraries.

George Packer’s lengthy investigation into the company sheds light on its rise to global dominance:

Amazon employs or subcontracts tens of thousands of warehouse workers, with seasonal variation, often building its fulfillment centers in areas with high unemployment and low wages. Accounts from inside the centers describe the work of picking, boxing, and shipping books and dog food and beard trimmers as a high-tech version of the dehumanized factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” Pickers holding computerized handsets are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles per shift around a million-square-foot warehouse, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds. After watching footage taken by an undercover BBC reporter, a stress expert said, “The evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.” The company says that its warehouse jobs are “similar to jobs in many other industries.” …

None of Amazon’s U.S. workers belong to unions, because the customer would suffer. A company executive told the Times that Amazon considers unions to be obstacles that would impede its ability to improve customer service. In 2011, the Allentown Morning Call published an investigative series with accounts of multiple ambulances being parked outside a warehouse during a heat wave, in order to ferry overcome workers to emergency rooms. Afterward, Amazon installed air-conditioners, although their arrival coincided with the expansion of grocery services. In any case, Amazon’s warehouse jobs are gradually being taken over by robots. [Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff] Bezos recently predicted to a gobsmacked Charlie Rose that, in five years, packages will be delivered by small drones. Then Amazon will have eliminated the human factor from shopping, and we will finally be all alone with our purchases.

Reihan questions Amazon’s labor practices:

[S]hould Bezos be celebrated for investing in automation despite the fact that there are large numbers of people living in the United States who are willing, and in some cases even eager, to take on such jobs? One interpretation is that what Bezos really ought to do is raise wages and improve conditions in his fulfillment centers, regardless of cost or impact on delivery times for consumers, as this is the humane thing to do. Such a policy would presumably improve the relative position of firms that instead subjected their employers to harsher terms and conditions, or indeed firms that replaced such workers with machines. Bezos might be in a position to unilaterally redistribute resources from Amazon consumers to Amazon workers if he achieves a durable near-monopoly. It is not obvious that this is an outcome that Packer would celebrate, or that those of us in the broader public ought to celebrate either.

Andrew Leonard suggests broader cultural shifts have done more damage to the book industry than Amazon specifically:

Maybe Jeff Bezos executes his business plan better than all of his competitors, but what’s been happening to culture is a consequence of the digitization of content. If you can copy it digitally, you can distribute it more cheaply than it costs to produce it. An almost throwaway line in Packer’s piece –”None of Amazon’s U.S. workers belong to unions, because the consumer would suffer” — emphasizes the same point. The consumer is driving the bus. Low prices and convenience have been pushing forward the evolution of technocapitalism for many decades (and maybe all the way back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution). And while we know that consumers want low prices and easy access, we do not necessarily know that they want a lot of serious literary fiction, or biographies that require five years of research, or hard-hitting investigations of how Wall Street and Silicon Valley have broken the back of organized labor. The democratization of distribution has perversely inverted that classic Rolling Stones maxim: In the Amazonian future, the people get what they want, but not, maybe, what they need.

Lauren Collins maintains that Amazon is indispensible for readers who lack a neighborhood bookstore:

George Packer is right to question Amazon’s effect on the publishing and book-selling industries, and those with a Three Lives or a Bonnie Slotnick or a Tattered Cover around the corner—or even across town—should peruse them or lose them. But for those of us who live in places where the books we want are not available—Packer touches on the point, writing, “Readers, especially isolated ones, adored Amazon”—the importance of Amazon cannot be understated. I live in Switzerland, and Amazon is a lifeline. No one else is coming to give us “French Lessons,” Alice Kaplan’s 1994 memoir of language assimilation, or Rebecca Mead’s “My Life in Middlemarch,” the day it comes out. I know I’m late to the Kindle game, but one showed up under the tree at Christmas, and, since then, I’ve been on a tear. Already I’ve bought, read, and been moved by more books than I did at the bookstore all of last year.

Carolyn Kellogg talked to Packer about his own consumer preferences:

Although Packer shines a critical light on Amazon, he said he believes that the company has provided a seductive level of customer satisfaction; he himself is a customer. “I try not to use it for books more than I have to,” he said, “because I see a real value in walking into a bookstore and seeing things jump off the shelves.”