Amazon's Jungle Logic by Richard Russo

Richard Russo wrote an interesting article about Amazon in today's New York Times. Apparently Amazon is encouraging its customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores and use its "price-check app" to see if they can get a better deal online. Russo then polled other authors about this practice. Dennis LeHane and Andre Dubus III were two authors who had something to say about this: “Scorched-earth capitalism” is how Dennis described it. “They don’t win unless they destroy their competition and then rub their noses in it.” Andre was outraged by Amazon’s attempt to turn its customers into “Droid-packing” spies. Like Dennis, he saw the move as an unsubtle attempt to monopolize the market, the effect of which would ultimately be to “further devalue, as a cultural and human necessity, the book” itself." Read the full article here.