Morning Must-Read: Barry Eisler: Franklin Foer: “Stop Amazon, Keep Publishing Exactly As It’s Always Been!”

Barry Eisler: Franklin Foer: “Stop Amazon, Keep Publishing Exactly As It’s Always Been!”: “Then he goes on to make a claim that can only be the product of shocking ignorance or brazen deceit: ‘That term [monopoly] doesn’t get tossed around much these days, but it should.’ Holy shit, ‘Amazon is a monopoly’ doesn’t get tossed around much these days?! Did Foer even read the George Packer piece he cites?…Has he read David Streitfeld in the New York Times, or Laura Miller in Salon?… Just Google “Amazon Hachette Monopoly” and see what you come up with. I see three general possible explanations for Foer’s remarkably inaccurate claim: 1.  Foer is embarrassingly ignorant…. 2. Foer is aware of how hoary the ‘Amazon is a monopoly’ meme has become… but doesn’t want to admit he has nothing new to say…. 3.  Foer is aware of how hoary the ‘Amazon is a monopoly’ meme has become, but believes no other activist… has been sufficiently alarmist… is adequately conveying just how terrifying it all is. 4. Foer… also knows you can lend an air of false gravitas to bogus claims and conspiracy theories by implying the mainstream media is too cowed to Speak The Truth…. Really, is it possible to write a 3000-word article–with references to articles that themselves claim Amazon is a monopoly–and genuinely believe ‘the term monopoly doesn’t get tossed around much these days’?…

The tendentiousness in Foer’s argument isn’t even what’s most interesting about it. What’s implicit is even more so: that it would actually be bad if more people could afford to buy books by Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan. How is this view any different from the arguments that must have been made against the Vulgate Bible, or the Guttenburg printing press? ‘Tsk, isn’t this just going to make reading more accessible to the unwashed masses?’ If you haven’t read it already, I can’t recommend highly enough this article by Clay Shirky about the aristocratic, elitist, narcissistic worldview always inherent in the minds of people like Foer.