Melville House Books

The worry about Amazon deepens and spreads: Now, David Ulin, editor of the book section of the Los Angeles Times, says in an op-ed that ” it’s not the incidents themselves but their ramifications that are disturbing, the idea that Amazon can effectively alter the collective memory at will. The issue, in other words, isn’t that Amazon has erased material from people’s Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can.”

Ulin, who says he not only owns a Kindle but reads ebooks regularly, notes that “There’s always a justification — whether it be a rights issue (as it was with Orwell) or a programming error — but the result is the same. The collective memory, our shared informational heritage, is compromised, and we are the poorer for it, not to mention at the mercy of the very sorts of outside forces writers such as Orwell have always warned us against …. Does Amazon.com, as its detractors claim, want to control, or even censor, certain types of literature? As long as there’s money to be made, I can’t see why it would. But economics is a slippery territory, defined by self-interest rather than the public good. And that, as Amazon.com continues to remind us, makes for its own kind of memory hole.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.