Because of its overwhelming market power, it sets its own retail price, and demands lower cost prices from publishers, whose lower margins are reflected in the writer’s royalties. Amazon does not abide by the recommended retail price you see on the back cover. If you buy my book from Amazon, I receive a lower royalty than I would if you bought it from the bookshop around the corner. Amazon has, by and large, been bad for people like me, because it has been bad for the industries we rely on – publishing and retail bookselling.
Some further perversities: I make my living mostly through my books, and I rely, as such, on the relative robustness of the transatlantic book business. This is a man who, despite living on a planet where one third of human beings don’t have access to safe drinking water, told Business Insider magazine that “the only way I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel”. This is a man who, last July, in the midst of a global pandemic and a devastating economic crisis, increased his personal wealth by $13bn in the course of a single day. This is a man who makes about $149,000 with every passing minute.
It’s like trying to think about deep time: the mind’s eye glazes over. It’s impossible to even conceive of the scale of this man’s wealth. But even if the means by which that wealth had been amassed were somehow unobjectionable, it would still stand, purely on its own terms, as a moral obscenity. The way that Amazon does business – its pressuring of suppliers, its systematic annihilation of retail competitors, its incessant harvesting of its customers’ data, its treatment of its own workers as little better than machines – is, of course, inseparable from the personal wealth of its founder, Jeff Bezos, who earlier this week stepped down as CEO of the company. I think of myself as a socialist, but my purchase history leaves me no choice but to also think of myself as a loyal customer of. My point here is that my relationship with this company is an extremely vexed one. There’s a good reason for this, or at any rate a clear one: I was at that point in the middle of researching a book about climate change, capitalism and apocalyptic anxieties.
What strikes me as somewhat ironic now is how many of those books – bought from a company owned by a man who was, at that point, the richest person on Earth, and which is responsible for roughly the same annual carbon emissions as Norway – could be categorised under two major headings: anti-capitalism and climate change. My Amazon ordering peaked in 2018, a year in which I bought 92 books from the site. What kind of person purchases within the space of a few days, as I did in August of 2012, a Le Creuset non-stick crepe pan, three blue and white herringbone tea-towels, and a 700-odd page biography of the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno? (The tea-towels are still in use, and so is the crepe pan, while the 700-plus page Adorno biography remains, inevitably, unread.) Perhaps the answer is as simple as: a person with an Amazon account. From the bare facts of the things I once bought, I began to reconstruct where I was in life, and what I was doing at the time, and what I was (or wanted to be) interested in. I experienced an estranged recognition, as if reading an avant-garde biography of myself, ghost-written by an algorithm. Seeing all those hundreds of items bought and delivered, many of them long since forgotten, was a vaguely melancholy experience. I know these things because I recently spent a desultory morning clicking through all 16 years of my Amazon purchase history. Everything ever published by the American novelist Nicholson Baker. Strangely, I bought nothing at all from Amazon the following year, and then, in 2006, I embarked on a PhD and started ramping up my acquisition of the sort of books that were not easily to be found in brick-and-mortar establishments. This was swiftly followed by three more DVD purchases I have no memory of making. My nearest guess is that I got it as a Christmas present for my nephew, who would at that point have been one year old, and at the very peak of his interest in finger-puppet animals who cavort to xylophone arrangements of Beethoven. I don’t recall making the purchase, but the data is unequivocal on this point: on 14 November 2004, I bought Baby Einstein: Baby Noah – Animal Expedition for the sum of £7.85.
T he first thing I ever bought on Amazon was an edutainment DVD for babies.
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