World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

JEFF BEZOS HAS FAMOUSLY MANAGED to convince Wall Street that his retail operation doesn’t require short-term profits; that quarterly earnings are nothing, compared with the riches over the horizon that will arrive once Amazon cements its dominance. With such forbearance, he can afford to experiment, to probe publishing for points of weakness. Not all of Amazon’s many efforts to seize terrain from the publishers have worked. In 2011, Amazon set up an old-fashioned New York publishing house. It hired eminent editors, installed them in a high-rent office, and gave them a pile of money to acquire books. That business floundered when it paid large advances to buy celebrity memoirs (Penny Marshall, Billy Ray Cyrus) and literary fiction that flopped, even with all of the company’s might behind the effort. But that was a conventional effort, and Amazon is not a conventional company. It has succeeded by creating a new set of rules. Rather than working with established authors, it cultivates new ones. Or rather, it has built its own mass-market imprints, recruiting an army of genre writers, and it has encouraged frustrated lawyers and fed-up schoolteachers to self-publish their novels directly to the Kindle. Many of these writers have folders full of rejection letters that they have received from New York publishers. They are willing, for the most part, to work without receiving advance payments. So, Amazon incurs little or no financial risk in backing their work. It finds an audien...