Everything and Less - The Novel in the Age of Amazon

This is a fairly academic look at how Amazon has affected the world of literary fiction, and genre fiction. It takes a brief look at the enshittification cycle that Amazon is embarking on as it changes it's stance from growing the sellers on it's platform, to driving prices down and extracting as much profit as possible from every place they can get away with.

It also spends a long section looking at "dead" fiction. Fiction that was written but no one will ever read because there is so much being published that it far outstrips the ability of the entire reading world to keep up with any portion of it.

If you're looking for an academic look at the cultural affects that Amazon has had on literary fiction, then this might be the book you're looking for. I found lots of big words, and references to "classics" that I have never read so while I did get some value from the book, I feel like I also missed much that could be gained by someone that understands the literary fiction world already.

Purchase Everything and Less on Amazon

- [[The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson]] Pg 4
- the project phase of the Kindle eReader was named after technology found in this book
- [[The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro]] Pg 4
- credited as the book that most inspired [[Amazon]] and was at one time required reading for employees
- reading for pleasure is mostly an educated [[middle class]] passtime, who also happen to be primary users of [[Amazon]] Pg 4
- [[Jeff Bezos]] 1997 letter to shareholders was about foregoing profit to get customers, or give customers all the benefits, but now that Amazon has acquired dominance it's moved to the [[enshitification cycle]] and started to take all the value from the buyers and sellers into it's own pockets. Pg 9
- this is what Chris Dixon called the attract/extract cycle in [[Read Write Own - Chris Dixon]] and he would label Amazon as a corporate network
- the story of most Amazon authors is modest sales achieved through relentless marketing and cultivation of an email list and [[social media]] engagement in a never ending cycle. Pg 12
- see also the ever churn of writing [[How independent writers are turning to AI]]
- [[Book Wars - John B Thompson]] Pg 22

### 1 - Fiction as Service

- like magic systems in fantasy, technology has the capacity to magnify our abilities and make wizards of us all. Pg 35
- instead it's made a few people very rich and reinforced the precarity of most people as they serve an economic system they didn't invent or ask for
- this idea of technology as neutral is similar to [[Read Write Own - Chris Dixon]] as Dixon says [[blockchain]] is neutral and we should ignore all the "bad" usage of it because that's no the fault of blockchain
- this is similar to saying that [[capitalist|capitalism]] is neutral and we should overlook all the "bad" things like the continued errosion of workers pay/rights as few people get rich
- the rise of [[Amazon]] as a seller of books is associated with the lowering of incomes for full-time writers, which makes the MFA (Writing) all the more needed for authors as they make more money from teaching than they ever will from their writing. Pg 40
- [[Real Time - Regis McKenna]] Pg 57
- a discussion of real time retail, where the customer needs should be satisfied immediately with no waiting allowed on the customer end
- [[The Rise of Writing - Deborah Brandt]] Pg 63
- examines the change in writing as a medium of self-expression to the dominant thing that employees produce in their conscription to wage labour
- [[How to Succeed in the Publishing Game - Vickie M Stringer Mia McPherson]] Pg 65
- the [[freelance]] worker is the original [[gig economy]] worker as the "freedom" is often used by companies who are free from providing economic stability or benefits to the transient workers. Pg 66
- [[I Hate the Internet - Jarett Kobek]] Pg 67

Amazon's huge market has made writing reachable for anyone that's willing to go through with [[KDP]] but that also has had the consequence of flooding the market and Amazon now moving into it's [[enshitification cycle]] as it continues to take more income from the sellers as the must purchase position in search results to make any money at all.

### 2 - What is Multinational Literature?

- [[Reality Is Broken - Jane McGonigal]] Pg 80
- a look at how [[video games]] shape society and make us better
- for a long time the book has been seen as an industrial product, made in the many by machines, but now it's a service product produced and distributed to entertain readers who want to be told a story Pg 88
- you can see this in the [[Kindle Unlimited]] subscription where the individuality of any single book is lost in the quest of an every desired flow of content for readers
- see [[How independent writers are turning to AI#^111ae16a]] where the author surveyed readers who said they'd leave if they didn't get a new novel every 3 - 4 months.
- [[Beyond Labor's Veil - Robert E Weir]] Pg 93
- a look at the [[unions]] culture and how comprehensive it was, though it's now all but extinct
- the [[gig economy]] is about defining workers as contractors so you can not bother caring about their welfare as people Pg 94
- but [[Capitalism Requires Scarcity]] of workers for them to continue to allow themselves to be put in these positions which means you must fight [[unions]]
- the indie author is a form of this as well, but we idealise this view of the lone writer with their laptop/pen labouring on their own to bring us a story
- if the unpaid commute to work is theft of worker time as claimed by [[Seasonal Associate - Heike Geissler]] then it's a requirement of capitalism because [[Capitalism Requires Scarcity]] Pg 101
- high [[real estate]] prices and high [[rent]] is another tool to drive workers away from the places they work and increase their [[Scarcity 180920201044]] so that they'll work for the scraps that the company is willing to pay
-

- so far in this instance, multinational literature is literature and publishing companies that must operate at a multinational scale with ever increasing growth to serve the [[stock market]] and [[shareholder]]s
- amazon is globalizing English writing as most of the books it's ever sold are written in English
- I wouldn't be suprised if they are [[United States|American]] centric as well which brings to mind [[Not Here - Rob Goodman]] about how we need to not allow American culture to invade every part of life

### 3 - Generic Love or the Realism of Romance

- the seemingly unquenchable thirst of women for Romance novels, specifically the ones where a young woman brings that dastardly possibly abusive man to heal, continues to show that female readers are a much more important literary segment to book publishers than men are. Pg 121
- with [[Amazon]] publishing glut of cheap over-supply in books to read competes with the scant time of readers. Pg 121, 122
- [[Love as Passion - Niklas Luhmann]] Pg 122, 123
- [[Cute Quaint Hungry And Romantic - Daniel Harris]] Pg 123
- the novel, and trashy novels in particular, are an escape from the life you live into something more romantic, more daring, something with more money and power. Pg 129
- in a culture based in [[consumerism]] there is a scarcity of [[freedom]] as we continually think of the value of our time if we're doing something outside working. Pg 134
- [[The Anthropology of Time - Alfred Gell]] Pg 135

### 4 - Unspeakable Conventionality

- [[Reading as Therapy - Timothy Aubry]] Pg 161
- how much of our current reading is about coddling ourselves instead of challenging ourselves? Pg 161
- not that there is something wrong with reading for pure pleasure and escaping stuff
- not that we should look down an anyone that chooses to read for "theraputic" reasons especially with the shit that's happening around us in the world today
- it's easy to get superior minded because we read "hard" books when others "merely" read fiction
- [[Dreams Before the Start of Time - Anne Charnock]] Pg 164
- Sure [[Fifty Shades Of Grey - E L James]] has "kink" but it's still a white dude and white woman that are engaging in [[heterosexual]] [[sex]] and what's more vanilla than that. Pg 165
- so the book is making a distinction between "literary fiction" and "genre fiction" with the latter seemingly viewed as "lesser" at least in come circles Pg 168
- it's doing some documenting of how the vast publishing house of [[Amazon]] pushes more genre fiction instead of literary fiction as it publishes at an astonishing pace
- [[KDP]] is by and large a place for the production of crowd pleasing novels, so genre fiction Pg 168
- specifically the Romance novel is almost entirely a genre of escape/fantasy and mostly of entirely conventional [[patriarchy]] where man meets woman and one tames the other where they become a regular family unit that society would recognise for generations past. Pg 170
- though novels of the past like Middlemarch, or anything from Jane Austen are still considered excellent. Pg 171
- so how has the Romance genre changed so much that authors of literary fiction want to distance themselves from the genre which has produced many items that are considered classics?
- [[Reading the Romance - Janice A Radway]] Pg 171
- [[Hard-Core Romance - Eva Illouz]] Pg 171

### 5 - World Scaling

- the Amazon Kindle Unlimited payment structure of paying by pages read means that you can't start your novel slow or people won't even bother to get into it. You must start directly with action and something interesting because people can just download, essentially for free, the next book that interests them and move on. Pg 198
- this method of payment also leads authors to **not** experiment because anything outside of the normal expectations of the genre are more likely to be put down by people not wanting to engage deeply with something new, they often want the same known paths that other books have covered
- [[capitalist|capitalism]] has never lacked a strong commitment to [[consumerism]], which has a militant imposition of the "new" and ideally addictive so that we desire more and continue to consume. Pg 213

### 6 - Surplus Fiction

- [[The Wealth of Nations 130920200916]] Pg 240
- people who write books that no one ever reads, as must happen with 1.6 million ISBN's were issued in a year, are destroying time...their own time as no one will read what work they did. Pg 243
- but that supposes that the purpose of the author writing the story was getting a reader and not simply a compulsion to write for their own benefit, as a way of sharing a story they couldn't shake in their mind
- this falls into [[Puritan Work Ethic|Protestant Work Ethic]] assuming that all effort must be "productive" and has the purpose of being economically productive, or why would it be done
- [[Wasting Time on the Internet - Kenneth Goldsmith]] Pg 243