If you enter “Amazon bookshop” on Google, dozens of links appear to Amazon pages that sell 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 5,000 best-selling books most sought after by their customers, a lot less 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.
Excerpt from Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto by Jorge Carrión, November 15, 2017
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