World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

by Franklin Foer

With its market share, publishers are utterly dependent on the Bezos behemoth to sell their product. This gives Amazon the power to squeeze and further squeeze its suppliers, to dictate terms to publishers. Its contracts with publishers extract capricious fees and far larger chunks of profit than a more competitive marketplace would demand. Publishers have acquiesced to Amazon at times, and violently resisted at others. Yet there’s no real recourse. When Amazon tightens its chokehold around publishers, it is authors who suffer. The houses shrink the number of titles they publish; they carve the advances they pay to authors into smaller chunks, doled out over larger spans of time. We can hardly ascribe the collapse in author pay to Amazon alone, but it has become a primary driver of the deflation of writing. Facebook and Google have found an even more effective cure for writing’s cost disease. They never, ever, under any circumstances, pay for it.