Like Sauron’s Ring, the notion of a single red-eyed Amazon sweeping all competing bookstores aside has long filled with me horror at the decades of darkness such domination could usher in for publishers and authors around the world, and, eventually, inevitably, readers as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against Amazon per se. I use the company myself on rare occasions, because it simply is so huge that almost every conceivable book can be found within its online store. I do, however, have a problem with the way in which Amazon has been allowed by the legislative modus operandi of laissez faire (now that’s a turn of phrase!) in the US and UK, and other countries, to unfairly use its giant musculature to offer such unbeatable deals that traditional bookshops on high streets are now rarer than a banker with a conscience, and it has even managed now to fell another titan that had epic ambitions similiar to its own, namely Borders, which has gone into administration.

Borders was never interested in having town branches. It could only be found in cities that had the available space for its vast warehouse-like book, CD and DVD repositories in which a casual browser could be lost for days, emerging half-starved clutching 3 for 1 bestsellers. In common with many writers I miss the traditional small bookshops, run by real people, in which one could puzzle over the methodology employed in filling the shelves but you were always assured of hands-on help and maybe even a free cup of tea. Nostalgic? Hell yes. But it isn’t just nostalgia.

Something of the fabric of society is bleached and distressed, damaged and torn, by the slow but inevitable transformation of the book into the product. Creativity is squeezed out, eccentricity and imagination as well, leaving behind a wasteland in which WH Smith’s offers up only cookery books, crime thrillers, books ghost-written for celebrities, and books recommended by chat-show hosts for us to peruse. The literary landscape is transformed, with choice being offered up as the holy grail to entice us all—onto just one website—but choice, no matter how it is framed, is only choice for as long as new writers come along, to introduce new trends in writing and reignite interest in genres that fell out of fashion only to come back into vogue because of this or that writer’s daring.

The free market rules. This, we are repeatedly told, is a good thing. But what is good about ending up with less and less choice in where we shop, and, in the end, what we can actually buy? And what is the impact on authors both published and those yet to sign their first book deal, or find an agent? Who dares wins only applies to giants in the 21st Century. David no longer beats the giant, he is subsumed into its body in an act of grossly visceral and intimate assault, or he is crushed under heel to an unrecognisable smear on the dull concrete of our monocultural urban nirvanas that offer most people unthinking convenience and, to a few, a terrifying vision of dystopia, of Hell, that draws ever closer to full-on reality.

And what an absurd and hopeless world we live in, when we can now lament the passing of Borders because it means not three, but two, dominate the book-selling scene—one online, one in our cities. There’s Waterstones, you see, let’s not forget, how could we, not quite a full-on giant but certainly very tall and very fat, but one imagines it too is suffering the Amazon Effect (having itself had a devastating impact on small publishers, and reshaping the way in which the supply chain is operated). Borders and Amazon and Waterstones alike were feared and sometimes hated by those who love books, really love them and don’t just buy for presents or for something to read on holiday. We warned, like prophets ignored and lampooned, of the demise of the community bookshop, the little touches here and there that made the browsing at least as important to the shop owner as the actual buying, because ambience mattered and not just the cold, hard sell. The clones came, they saw, they conquered.

And now, if we’re lucky, as in my town, we have a couple of second-hand bookshops, a WH Smith, and access to Amazon online.

That’s choice in 2009.  Most who opt for Amazon every time care not for the physical experience of smelling and touching books, of using their eyes to browse shelf after shelf. They care only to get in, get the buying of product done quickly, and get back to whatever else is more important in their lives. It’s the slow death of something wonderful by a billion point and clicks.

And then there is the Kindle. In an age of global warming when peak oil is about to happen, if it hasn’t already, we are sold the brilliant idea of substituting paper and ink for a back-lit screen on the basis that it is more convenient and preferable than having just one smelly old book in your bag. At least Apple’s iTablet, if it’s really happening, promises more as a networked device for browsing websites, and writing as well as reading on the move. Just like a laptop, really, only flat as a pancake. With either of these the idea is you pay less for books. So what happens to making sure writers can afford to keep on writing? If we can earn no money in the brave new world from writing, if our books end up sold for 99 cents on Amazon to be downloaded, how much do you think we’d get per sale? Do you think any authors outside the top 50 could afford to make a living, to feed themselves? Only the convenience of digital is valued—not the substance, which is why people pirate videos and MP3s: there’s no difference between the authorised and the illegal. When we copied vinyl onto tape, there was a difference. You’d copy a friend’s LP and if you liked it, you’d buy it.

Authors should embrace the changes, we are told. By that, what is really meant is that we should switch focus from writing what we are compelled to write by our inner demons and look at what people want to buy, meaning we should always aim at the lowest common denominator. Imagine that decades or centuries ago. “I’m sorry, but War and Peace? No chance,” said the agent. “I mean, all well and good, you wrote a long book. But it’s a boring title. It doesn’t have a target demographic in mind. If you had a picture of Katie Price on the cover, maybe with a bit of tit showing, it would sell. But would anyone in the middle-class professional bracket read it? No. Sorry. We can’t publish this. Why don’t you try writing a book about silly swear words? We could market that.”

All hail Amazon, the victor. We all lose but the pain is only felt by those with the required nerve endings. For everyone else, the anaesthesia has been working its magic for at least the last thirty years. I see no reason to hope that the dosage will be reduced. The medications, propaganda and extinction-inducing ways of half-living necessarily imbibed in order to thrive in this merciless society will not be cut off any time soon. But, if history teaches us anything, it is that the big eventually, by some means, and usually taking everyone by surprise, fail and fall. It is true of empires. It is true of supermarkets. It is true of all-consuming monolithic booksellers. And for those who put all their faith and literature inside a Kindle, their collections will only last for as long as the power supply.

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