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    Against Amazon: and Other Essays
    Against Amazon: and Other Essays
    Against Amazon: and Other Essays
    Ebook224 pages3 hours

    Against Amazon: and Other Essays

    By Jorge Carrión and Peter Bush

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    A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK

    Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges … A pleasing labyrinth where you can’t get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.

    Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader’s History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carrión travels from London to Geneva, from Miami’s Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Verne’s Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Korea’s bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librarians—including Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among others—Against Amazon is equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letter—and, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBiblioasis
    Release dateNov 17, 2020
    ISBN9781771963046
    Against Amazon: and Other Essays

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    • 5/5
      The title is very poor for what is, in reality, an excellent set of essays on book culture, collecting, and shops. The introductory polemic against Amazon is fine, if a bit standard, but the book moves sharply along to a varied set of essays, interviews, and travelogues that I found extremely pleasant. I don't side with Carrión on everything (for example, his maybe-maybe-not tongue-in-cheek dislike for used bookshops over new; he says of used shops, "they are death") but he always provides food for thought. I loved the interview with Alberto Manguel (I know he's Argentine by birth, but allow me a little Canadian pride here) and I loved the essay on Borges. This is only Carrión's second book in English and I hope more is translated soon!

    Book preview

    Against Amazon - Jorge Carrión

    cover.jpg

    Biblioasis International Translation Series

    General Editor: Stephen Henighan

    1 I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski (Poland)

    Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

    2 Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (Angola)

    Translated by Stephen Henighan

    3 Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

    Translated by Jean M. Snook

    4 Dance with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)

    Translated by Lee Paula Springer

    5 Black Alley by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

    Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

    6 The Accident by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

    Translated by Stephen Henighan

    7 Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

    Translated by Colin Carberry

    8 The End of the Story by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

    Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

    9 The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

    Translated by David Brookshaw

    10 For as Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

    Translated by Judith Cowan

    11 Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    12 Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by Ondjaki (Angola)

    Translated by Stephen Henighan

    13 Montreal Before Spring by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald McGrath

    14 Pensativities: Essays and Provocations by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

    Translated by David Brookshaw

    15 Arvida by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    16 The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

    Translated by Sheila Fischman

    17 The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

    Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

    18 Black Bread by Emili Teixidor (Catalonia)

    Translated by Peter Bush

    19 Boundary by Andrée A. Michaud (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    20 Red, Yellow, Green by Alejandro Saravia (Bolivia-Canada)

    Translated by María José Giménez

    21 Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

    Translated by Peter Bush

    22 Transparent City by Ondjaki (Angola)

    Translated by Stephen Henighan

    23 Oscar by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    24 Madame Victoria by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

    Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

    25 Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

    Translated by Eric M. B. Becker

    26 The Dishwasher by Stéphane Larue (Quebec)

    Translated by Pablo Strauss

    27 Mostarghia by Maya Ombasic (Bosnia-Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    28 If You Hear Me by Pascale Quiviger (Quebec)

    Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

    29 Dead Heat by Benedek Totth (Hungary)

    Translated by Ildikó Noémi Nagy

    30 The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen (Norway)

    Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

    31 You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert (Quebec)

    Translated by Donald Winkler

    32 Against Amazon and Other Essays by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

    Translated by Peter Bush

    First published as Contra Amazon by Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, Spain 2019.

    Copyright © Jorge Carrión, 2019

    Translation copyright © Peter Bush, 2020

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca

    or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

    First Edition

    ISBN

    978-1-77196-303-9 (Trade Paper)

    ISBN

    978-1-77196-304-6 (eBook)

    Title: Against Amazon : and other essays / Jorge Carrión ; translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush.

    Other titles: Contra Amazon. English

    Names: Carrión, Jorge, 1976- author.

    Series: Biblioasis international translation series; no. 32.

    Description: Series statement: Biblioasis international translation series ; no. 32 |

    Translation of: Contra Amazon.

    Identifiers: Canadiana (ebook) 20200154095 | Canadiana (print) 20200154060 |

    ISBN

    9781771963046 (ebook) |

    ISBN

    9781771963039 (softcover)

    Subjects:

    LCSH

    : Amazon.com (Firm) |

    LCSH

    : Internet bookstores. |

    LCSH

    : Bookstores. |

    LCSH

    : Bookstores—Social aspects. |

    LCSH

    : Electronic commerce. |

    LCSH

    : Electronic commerce—Social aspects. |

    LCSH

    : Booksellers and bookselling.

    Classification:

    LCC Z278.I568

    C3713 2020 | DDC 381/.4500202854678—dc23

    Edited by Stephen Henighan and Daniel Wells

    Copyedited by Emily Donaldson

    Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

    This book has been published with a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Sport of Spain.

    Contents

    Author’s Note

    Against Amazon: Seven Arguments

    ∙

    A Manifesto

    I.

    Because I don’t want to be an accomplice to symbolic expropriation

    II.

    Because we are all cyborgs, but not robots

    III.

    Because I reject hypocrisy

    IV.

    Because I don’t want to be an accomplice to a new empire

    V.

    Because I don’t want them to spy on me while I am reading

    VI.

    Because I defend being slow yet quick, and relatively close

    VII.

    Because I’m not ingenuous

    The Best Bookshops in the World Aren’t the Ones You Think They Are

    Journey to the End of the Light: Walking around London with Iain Sinclair

    I.

    Home

    II.

    A Stroll

    III.

    Taxi

    The World’s Most Important Libraries Aren’t the Ones You Think They Are

    Before and After Borges

    I Dismantle My Library

    I.

    The First Library

    II.

    Universities

    III.

    My Library is falling to pieces but it is still my memory

    The Legendary Bookshops of David B.

    From Little Havana to Miamizuela

    My Bookish Buenos Aires: An interview with Alberto Manguel in the National Library of Argentina

    That Conundrum We Call a Bookshop

    Fictional Libraries

    I.

    The Common Heritage

    II.

    The Library of Alonso el Quijano, el Bueno

    III.

    The Library on the Nautilus

    IV.

    The Library of Babel

    The Dogs of Capri

    I.

    The Selfie House

    II.

    Under the Volcano

    III.

    The Sea in Miniature

    In Defence of Bookshops

    Bookshops: Second-hand Versus New

    ∙

    A Conversation with Luigi Amara

    Bookshops Are Being Reinvented in Tokyo

    Against Bibliophilia

    Where Does Paper End and Screen Begin? A Journey to Seoul Beset by Questions

    The Future of Libraries

    I.

    Book Burning

    II.

    Social Vocation

    III.

    The Future Is in the Past

    COVID-19 and Bookshops

    ‌

    Author’s Note

    Contra Amazon. Siete razones / un manifiesto (Against Amazon. Seven reasons / a manifesto) was published online by Jot Down Magazine in April 2017. The Spanish magazine also printed several hundred posters that were sent to bookshops throughout Spain. They can still be found, framed, in Rata Corner in Palma de Mallorca, and in the corners of other front-line bookshops. In November that same year it appeared in English, translated by Peter Bush, digitally on Literary Hub and on paper in a beautiful hand-sewn pamphlet the Canadian publishing house Biblioasis sent to three hundred bookshops and journalists during the launch of Bookshops in America and Canada. The chapbook aroused such interest that my publisher, Dan Wells, ended up giving away almost five thousand copies to professionals in the trade across the world. It was also published in Portuguese in a translation by the Brazilian writer Reginaldo Pujol in the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. When Publishers Weekly focused on the unexpectedly international phenomenon in May 2018, Dan and I spoke on the phone and decided to put together this book, which immediately won the support of Joan Tarrida, my Spanish publisher. I began at once to assemble and read all the articles, essays, interviews, and chronicles I had published on the world of books in recent years. I selected the best ones. To my surprise, the word Amazon appeared in many of them. Alberto Manguel had even told me at one point, without my having asked him the question, I don’t buy from Amazon, as if this were a necessary stance. Which camp are you in?

    It seems impossible to write about activity in the world of books in the twenty-first century, about independent bookshops and the most innovative, challenging libraries, or the constellations of readers who remain faithful to the printed book, without thinking of Amazon as our adversary. Although Google Books and other big platforms have also influenced the ways in which we relate to texts, the multinational logistics firm headed by Jeff Bezos has become the most iconic and strident brand, the one that has violently changed—and often damaged—the traditional relationships between reader and book. Amazon is a tentacled monster that continually grows and innovates. If a few details in my manifesto have become obsolete, its spirit remains relevant. At the beginning of 2019, thanks to the struggle led by Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York City rejected the plan to give Amazon $3.4 billion in incentives to set up a base there. Since then, when you key against Amazon into a search engine, it’s no longer just my manifesto that appears. In a parallel development, there has been a proliferation of Amazon deliverers roaming our streets with their big backpacks, as well as those working for other companies that, in their own ways, are equally disruptive. In neo-liberal style, they have made the precarious habits of the poor who collect cardboard and scrap metal their own.

    I wrote Bookshops in 2012, never imagining that it would be runner-up for the Anagrama Essay Prize or that it would be published in so many languages and read throughout the world, thanks to the initial commitment of Christopher MacLehose. I have continued to visit bookshops across five continents and study their histories. Thanks to the translations, I have been able to return to some of the world’s best bookshops and add others, most of them remarkable, to my collection. I still haven’t visited in person what is probably the most important bookshop in my life: Biblioasis in Windsor, Ontario, with its black awning, wonderful books selection, and team of booksellers and editors who were the first to take an interest in publishing Bookshops beyond the frontiers of my country, though I have often virtually walked along Wyandotte Street, looked at the program poster outside the Olde Walkerville Theatre, fantasized about eating New Orleans cuisine at Nola’s, and finally come to a halt outside the bookshop entrance. The same grey car is always parked by the door in the Google Street View photographs.

    In recent years I’ve developed a passion for visiting the oldest, most original or striking libraries in the cities to which I travel. Books circulate around a quadrangle whose vertices are publishers, bookshops, and private and public libraries. We readers are in the centrifugal centre of that non-stop traffic. You only have to visit your local library to realize that not every scrap of information is to be found on the internet. I remembered something even more crucial in Argentina’s National Library, Melbourne’s Victoria State Library, Seoul’s Hyundai Card Libraries, Tokyo’s International Library of Children’s Literature, or Beijing’s fantastic Kids Republic bookshop, which offers books and other things to touch: the experiences these spaces offer you do not have a digital equivalent. It is why the children’s sections of bookshops and libraries are also incredibly important: they have the power to shape the readers and users of the future. Novels, films, comics, and television constantly imagine bookish spaces—both in realist mode and in fantasy and sci-fi narratives—because the convergence of discourse and object, virtual and physical, mind and body, is what makes us human.

    Thanks to the translations of Bookshops—or maybe they are to blame—I have also discovered dark corners in some of the world’s most famous bookshops. The touristy, beautiful Lello in Porto doesn’t sell the Portuguese edition, Livrarias, apparently because some of the details I mention about the store—culled from their web page—are incorrect, and, above all, because my publishers refused to put an image of their bookshop on the book’s cover. And Shakespeare & Company doesn’t sell the French or English editions because they recount the true story of George Whitman and refer to other books, which they don’t sell either, as sources. Censorship is everywhere. Amazon and the huge digital platforms aren’t our only adversaries. We must continue reading and travelling. And always stay on the alert.

    —Jorge Carrión

    Barcelona, April 2019

    ‌

    Against Amazon: Seven Arguments

    A Manifesto

    ‌

    I Because I don’t want to be an accomplice to symbolic expropriation

    For fifty-five years that building in Barcelona, one of the city’s few examples of modern industrial architecture, was the head office of publishers Gustavo Gili. Now, after a refurbishment costing several million euros, it has become Amazon’s local centre of operations. Thanks to the technology of efficiency and immediacy that it houses, Barcelona is now one of forty-five cities in the world where the company guarantees delivery of products in an hour. The Canuda bookshop, which closed in 2013 after over eighty years of existence, is now a gigantic Mango clothing store. The Catalònia bookshop, after over a hundred, is now a McDonald’s with kitschy modernist decor. Expropriation is literal and physical, but also symbolic.

    Typing Amazon bookshop into Google yields dozens of links to Amazon pages selling bookshelves. As I will never tire of repeating: Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a hypermarket. Its warehouses store books next to toasters, toys, or skateboards. In its new physical bookshops, books are placed face up, because they only display the six thousand books most sought after by their customers, far fewer than the number on the shelves of genuine bookshops that are prepared to take risks. Amazon is now considering whether to repeat the same operation with a chain of small supermarkets; as far as it is concerned, there is no difference between a cultural institution and an establishment that sells food and other goods.

    Jeff Bezos has a history of lengthy, symbolic expropriations. He opted to sell books rather than electrical goods because he saw a niche in the market: no bookshop could accommodate his plan to offer every single title available. In the 1990s, there were few large-scale competitors (mainly Barnes & Noble and Borders) and distributors that had adapted to the digital age by incorporating ISBN numbers into their catalogues, which is why Bezos took an American Booksellers Association course and, in record time, appropriated the prestige books had accumulated over centuries.

    Even today, when Amazon produces television series, offers music online, stocks spare parts for cars and motorcycles, and is considering getting into the prepaid cell-phone business, people continue to associate the brand with the object and symbol we call a book. Kindle, from its launch in 2007, has imitated the form and tone of ink and the printed page. Fortunately, for the moment they can’t reproduce the vegetable feel or smell of lignin on screen. Whether we like it or not, we still cannot remember with the same precision what we read on a screen: architectural transitions happen quickly; mental transitions, less so.

    ‌

    II Because we are all cyborgs, but not robots

    We all carry implants.

    We all depend on that prosthetic: our cell phone.

    We are all cyborgs: mainly human, slightly mechanical.

    But we do not want to be robots.

    The work Amazon employees do is robotic. It was ever thus: in 1994, the five people working in Jeff Bezos’s garage in Seattle were already obsessed with speed. The company has remained that way for twenty years, with many employees telling stories of stress, harassment, and inhuman work conditions, all to achieve a horrendous, machine-like efficiency.

    The Amazonians are now helped by Kiva robots capable of lifting 340-kilo loads and that can move a metre and a half per second. Synchronized with the human labour force via an algorithm, their job is to lift shelves to facilitate product collection. After being gathered by the Kiva robots, purchased items move along a huge conveyor belt to the SLAM system (Scan, Label, Apply, Manifest), which performs the scanning and packaging.

    Kiva robots and the SLAM system are the result of years of research. Amazon commissioned robot competitions at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Seattle to perfect the processing of orders. Machines designed by MIT or the Technical University in Berlin competed to collect a rubber duck, a bag of Oreos, a toy dog, and a book in the shortest possible time. For Amazon, there is no substantial difference between those four items. They are equivalent commodities.

    But not for us.

    Amazon has gradually eliminated the human factor from its operations. In the early years, it employed people to write reviews of the books it sold; now the process of producing and placing a self-published book on their website isn’t even mediated. Amazon has robotized the chain of distribution and wants us, the consumers, to do the same.

    But we won’t.

    Because, for us, a book is a book is a book.

    And reading a book—whether by choice or because it was given as a present—is a rite, the echo of an echo of an echo of something once sacred.

    ‌

    III Because I reject hypocrisy

    It’s to the great shame of Barcelona, a city with many excellent bookshops, that for twenty-four years the Europa Bookshop, run by the neo-Nazi Pedro Varela, was an important centre for the

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