Amazing amazon

This being prompted by a review of 'The Everything Store', an account of the rise of Amazon, in a recent NYRB. In what follows I leave aside that now large part of the Amazon operation which is not books.

One the tone-setting allegations in the review was that (as of early June) Amazon were making it difficult to buy this book, but it seems to be alive and well and available today in a kindle edition for £6.99, so maybe one should read the review with care.

Nevertheless, I am reminded of the famous phrase from Lord Acton about how power corrupts (see September 22nd 2007 and October 21st 2008 in the other place), a phrase which must surely apply to Jeff Bezos: no-one can have the power he does without being corrupted in the process - one of the very good reasons why most countries do not allow their leaders more than two bites at the cherry. That said, not clear what form the corruption does or might take in this case.

The story seems to be that Bezos spotted an opportunity and went for it, providing a very efficient and very cheap service for a very large number of customers in the process, a service which is good enough to keep the anti-trust people at bay. One way he is able to do this is by squeezing publishers - who are now in a very poor bargaining position - and another is by squeezing his workers. So far so like WalMart. Nor does the company pay much tax, despite its huge turnover, but then it does not seem to make that much profit, at least not from what little you can make out from their published accounts. Nor does it pay dividends to its stockholders, with its investor relations page announcing that 'we have never declared or paid cash dividends on our common stock. We intend to retain all future earnings to finance future growth and, therefore, do not anticipate paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future' - so I don't think I will be stumping up $337.49 for a share any time soon. But it does appear to finance the Bezos ambitions for space travel through an outfit called 'Blue Origin' (see http://www.blueorigin.com/). Motto 'Gradatim ferociter'.

I am also reminded of the phrase that says you don't get to be a big cheese by being nice. There is clearly a lot of aggression out there.

So, despite the good service I get from Amazon, I worry about the use that it will make of its market power. Will the squeeze on margins mean that publishers will gradually pare down the quality of their offerings? That the digital offerings will never match that of the paper ones? I have, for example, formed the impression that a proportion of the digital books are poorly wrapped, that in a digital version of an old book one may not get too much apparatus to help one make sense of it, the sort of thing you do get in a good quality paper book. And will the kindle people ever get around to doing a proper job on on fiction?

I close with a minor moan. I do not buy kindle books that often and my kindle is not very wifi so I like to download my kindle books to my kindle via my PC. The minor moan is that, while I seem to have acquired a Kindle Cloud which I can use to read my purchases on any internet capable PC (which is good), I also seem to be losing touch with download (which is bad). I have to fiddle about to do it.

PS: as it happens, my last kindle purchase was from another very large company, IBM, and is about their drive to take computing to the next level. Part of which goes under the name of Watson, a nice conflation of Conan Doyle and the founder. There was quite a high charge per kindle page, but not that many pages and so far an interesting and easy read.