Amazon and the Future of the Novel

The New Yorker published Is Amazon Changing the Novel? and I am not sure if the review does or doesn't think Amazon can change the novel or if that is a bad thing.

...But, then, style has always shadowed modes of distribution in the history of the novel, from magazine serials to the Internet. In “Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon” (Verso), the literary scholar Mark McGurl considers all the ways a new behemoth has transformed not only how we obtain fiction but how we read and write it—and why. “The rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail,” he argues.

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The reader, in turn, has been reborn as a consumer in the contemporary marketplace, the hallmarks of which are the precision and the reliability with which particular desires are met. “A digital existence is a liquid existence, something like mother’s milk, flowing to the scene of need,” McGurl writes. That’s what Bill Gates promised the Web would do: provide “friction-free capitalism.” Can the ease of procuring a product translate into an aesthetic of its own? The critic Rob Horning has called the avoidance of friction “a kind of content in itself—‘readable books’; ‘listenable music’; ‘vibes’; ‘ambience’ etc.” On Amazon, the promise of easy consumption is even more pointed: with the discernment of algorithms, books aren’t just readable; they’re specifically readable by you. 

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And yet “Everything and Less” tells one story while seeming to enact another. For all the ways McGurl anatomizes the novel as a commodity in the age of Amazon, one is left observing something else entirely—all the ways in which the novel cannot be commodified. The novel is an intransigently private form, and this may be the real story of the book: McGurl’s surprise and delight as he ventured to the so-called margins of literary life and found more than he expected. That’s the nature of the novel; you have to cross its threshold without completely knowing what lies within. Mere ownership does not constitute possession. ♦

Meanwhile Dirt published Unskippable intros which attacks Netflix for its skip intro function and posits an artistic use for opening sequences. This gives me the idea that we need not succumb to the online giants.

And so we find ourselves in the increasingly bleak television landscape that exists today, four years and a whole cultural lifetime since Netflix established skipped intros as the ne plus ultra accessory to streaming consumption. Title sequences haven’t gone extinct, exactly, but it’s increasingly rare to find a streaming series that gets one genuinely worth watching. Why would any creative team bother, after all, when most Netflix viewers are just going to skip right past them? And to then mess with the title sequence in any artistically meaningful way?? In this economy???

This report from Reuters might be of interest: France moves to shield its book industry from Amazon.

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