A debate took place in New York last week.
The motion up for debate — Amazon is the Reader’s Friend.
The side arguing against the motion won handily.
Audience members vote before the debate and then again after the debate.
Before the debate 41 percent were for the motion, 28 percent were against the motion and 31 percent were undecided. After the debate, 42 percent were for the motion, 50 percent were against the motion and 8 percent were undecided.
The debate was one of 100 sponsored over the last few years by Intelligence Squared US and moderated by John Donvan, the ABC News correspondent.
Arguing for the motion was self-published author Joe Konrath and Matthew Yglesias, the editor at Vox.com.
Arguing against the motion was former New Republic editor Franklin Foer and best selling author Scott Turow.
It was a 100 minute debate, but in a nutshell, as Donvan summed it up — Konrath and Yglesias argued that Amazon is the reader’s friend and that this is obvious because readers are flocking to Amazon. It’s a company that gets more books to more people in more places than any other company in history. Amazon is publishing writers who could not get through the door at a lot of traditional publishers. They represent it as a kind of a freedom from publisher tyranny, and they basically say the bottom line is that Amazon makes a better progress and that the traditional publishers in this story are the bad guys.
Foer and Turow argued it’s all a trap. Amazon is more than halfway on its way to controlling everything in publishing, that Amazon is only Amazon’s friend, and that there will be a problem down the road when its chokehold is complete, that this is a company that cares as much about books as it does about socks and blenders, and, more than that, that the company plays dirty. It may be capitalism, but they’re playing by rules that are going to harm writers and harm books, and, therefore, harming readers, and, therefore, it can’t be the reader’s friend.
Foer opened with an antitrust argument — fitting, since his father is Albert Foer, the founder and former president of the American Antitrust Institute. (Dad was spotted in the audience rooting for the home team.)
“Amazon is a company,” Franklin Foer said. “They are not — they are not pursuing the greater good. They’re not pursuing cultural greatness. They are a company out to make a bunch of money. They have done this extremely well. They produce things at very low prices. They have technologically innovated all over the place. I use Amazon. You use Amazon. And there isn’t anything wrong about that.”
“The problem is this — it’s that they have done it extremely well. And — and a company can perform at a very high level, and in turn, obtain a monopoly. They can be the only player. Matt says they aren’t a monopoly. But when you control 70 percent of a market, that, historically, counts as a monopoly. In the old days, it — before — before the Reagan Revolution, before the Chicago School of Economics trashed antitrust law, our authorities used to get upset when companies controlled 10 percent of any given market. Not 70 percent — nearly 70 percent of any given market.”
“But this is different. This is books. This is about our crown intellectual jewels. This is about the thing that we should care most about in the world, because it’s about imagination. It’s about understanding our past. It’s about rooting out people in power. And when you have one company that sits there, and is the chokehold for books, that becomes a problem. It may not be a problem just now, but it will become a problem in the future. And it’s something that we, as readers, as citizens, as guardians of the book, need to pay incredibly close attention to. Why do I care about this? Well, when I wrote an article about Amazon in the New Republic, what was their immediate response? They yanked ads from the New Republic.”
“When it — they were having the dispute with Hachette, the publishing company — what
did they do? Well, they punished the guy who wrote the book about the Koch brothers, but they let Paul Ryan’s book go unscathed. They didn’t punish him. When a company has that chokehold, when they can decide who wins and who loses in the publishing game, we need to be very, very afraid as citizens.”
“So — what is Amazon? Amazon is the everything store. Their ambitions are boundless.
They name themselves after the largest river in the world. They’re making Woody Allen movies — television shows now. They’re selling you your underwear, your socks. They want everything. They want nothing else to be able to breathe on this planet except for their consumers and the people who make their goods. And so that’s a very, very dangerous thing, and we’ve seen this with publishing.”
Turow argued that “Amazon is nobody’s friend but Amazon’s.”
“They are capitalists of a particularly ruthless breed who, in point of fact, have habitually turned on their business allies whenever it meets their business needs.”
Anybody who believes that Amazon will use its power only in friendship has not read Lord Acton or Machiavelli,” Turow said.
“Amazon already pushes books forward on their site at the expense of others for
business purposes, or worse, for political purposes, and their tactics vary between the ruthless to the underhanded. Is Amazon being the reader’s friend, Matt, when they alter search results in exchange for promotional payments without acknowledging to their readers that they do that? “
Konrath and Yglesias dismissed the possibility that Amazon was a monopoly or was about to become one.
“Frank has written that Amazon is some kind of a monopoly, some kind of an abusive force that’s dominating the marketplace, maybe through nefarious means, something like that,” Yglesias said. “Some strategy other than being a reader’s friend. And I think that that’s just not true, this idea that Amazon must be stopped by some kind of external force. It doesn’t hold up, because the fact of the matter is even though Amazon has an extremely large share of the market, it faces a ton of competition. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m the owner of an iPhone.”
Or as Konrath put it — “It’s not about Amazon being a monopoly — that’s not the debate.”
“It is about Amazon being the reader’s friend. Amazon isn’t perfect. No person is. No company is,” Konarth said. “But let me tell you something. If Amazon right now were building a death machine that was fueled by the screams of puppies — it still wouldn’t matter because they’re still a friend to readers.”
In the end, the New York audience members watching the debate, almost all of whom admitted buying books on Amazon, sided with Turow and Foer.
Death machine fueled by puppy screams it is.