Amazon Is Reshaping Contemporary Literature
From the hypercommercialization of Kindle Singles to the fraught question of classifying book genres, Amazon has put its stamp on the literary field in ways large and small — but always in the interests of profit, says Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon.
Hundreds of books in shelves at the Amazon logistics center in Bad Hersfeld, Germany, in 2007. (Jens-Ulrich Koch / DDP / AFP via Getty Images)
Amazon is the third-largest company on Earth by revenue. Its influence is ubiquitous and growing. While many businesses downsized during the pandemic, Amazon went on an unprecedented hiring spree. In the first ten months of 2020 alone, the company more than doubled its US employee base. Through exploiting workers and plundering public resources, Amazon has amassed the power to shape not just consumer markets, but culture, too.
That’s what interests Mark McGurl, the Albert L. Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His latest book, Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, studies Amazon’s effect on a literary world in decline.
McGurl joined Alex Press on a recent episode of Jacobin’s Primer, a podcast about all things Amazon. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
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