Ursula K. Le Guin is worried about books. The problem, to oversimplify, is Amazon.
Le Guin, the sci-fi legend and author of Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea series, and dozens of other titles, has been raising the Amazon issue for some time now. Last year, when she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she used her speech to share her concerns about the publishing industry, citing a recent instance when a profiteering retailer tried “to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa.”
Her speech last year did not name Amazon, but the meaning wasn’t difficult to to parse: Amazon, and the power it maintains over publishers, is dramatically altering the landscape of what is written, published, and read. It’s not just Le Guin that’s making this claim. For years, publishers have feared the effects of Amazon, which operates essentially without competition. Last year’s stand-off between Hachette and Amazon realized many of those fears. Publishers need the online retail giant, and Amazon abuses that need for profit.
But Le Guin, a legend in her field with nothing to fear from Amazon, has been taking the fight to the public whenever she can. She did so again this week, in a blog post at Book View Cafe titled Up the Amazon with the BS Machine, in which Le Guin spells out how the world’s largest bookseller uses Best Seller lists to manipulate and abuse writers, publishers, and readers.
Here is Le Guin on the quality of work being produced in the era of Amazon:
If you want to sell cheap and fast, as Amazon does, you have to sell big. Books written to be best sellers can be written fast, sold cheap, dumped fast: the perfect commodity for growth capitalism.
The readability of many best sellers is much like the edibility of junk food. Agribusiness and the food packagers sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we come to think that’s what food is. Amazon uses the BS Machine to sell us sweetened fat to live on, so we begin to think that’s what literature is.
I believe that reading only packaged microwavable fiction ruins the taste, destabilizes the moral blood pressure, and makes the mind obese. Fortunately, I also know that many human beings have an innate resistance to baloney and a taste for quality rooted deeper than even marketing can reach.
Book readers will recognize the truth of Le Guin’s words here. Many (though not all) books that arrive on best seller lists are empty calories, the microwave burrito of fiction. They serve a purpose: good enough, easy, and capable of providing minimum necessary energy to get through the afternoon. There’s delight, but no effort, and very little reward other than satisfying an instant craving.
But they are not the life-giving, enriching experience of a well-prepared meal.
The cause of this books as burritos mentality is growth capitalism, which requires new Best Sellers to replace old ones, and old ones to be discarded.
Consistent in its denial of human reality, growth capitalism thinks only in the present tense, ignores the past, and limits its future to the current quarter. To the BS machine, the only value of a book is its current salability. Growth of capital depends on rapid turnover, so the BS machine not only isn’t geared to allow for durability, but actually discourages it. Fading BSs must be replaced constantly by fresh ones in order to keep corporate profits up.
The opposition force to the BS Machine is independent book sellers willing to sell books non-BS Machine produced titles. And publishing companies wiling to take chances on books without a clear marketability.
As a book dealer and publisher, Amazon wants no competitors, admits no responsibilities, and takes no risks.
Its ideal book is a safe commodity, a commercial product written to the specifications of the current market, that will hit the BS list, get to the top, and vanish. Sell it fast, sell it cheap, dump it, sell the next thing. No book has value in itself, only as it makes profit. Quick obsolescence, disposability — the creation of trash — is an essential element of the BS machine. Amazon exploits the cycle of instant satisfaction/endless dissatisfaction. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.
This is some harsh stuff. Le Guin creates a line here that many-myself included-will find difficult to hold. But the lodestone of her argument holds: Amazon is a limiting force in the world of books.
It creates a retail space that seems open and welcoming, but has no accountability to creators, publishers, or quality. Convenience and whole-sale prices are available (and they are VERY ENTICING), but they come at the cost of discovery. And that’s a very great cost.
It’s also important to keep in mind what is not said in this argument. Le Guin does not direct readers away from reading Best Sellers. And if she did, she would be wrong to do so. Readers should read anything they want, and damn anyone who says otherwise. Le Guin, though, is not doing so. She may think much of the BS machine produces trash, but the trash is a result of a broken, one-sided system. Le Guin is not out to condemn readers. She’s targeting the retailer that controls the industry.
Independent Bookstores are still in operation. They are even thriving. And they sell a lot books you might enjoy discovering. But if not, they sell your Best Sellers, too. Le Guin is not calling on readers to stop reading the Best Seller list. She’s telling people to buy your books at bookstores. That simple act could be enough to change the very nature of the Best Seller Machine.
