[SteveEisenberg]

I'm open to being anti-Amazon, but was not impressed with the letter of complaint. Take this:

The ultimate effects of Amazon’s business model . . . include the unfair promotion and suppression of specific ideas, authors, publishers . . .

This would be very bad! But they failed to name a single author or publisher suppressed by Amazon. As seen by googling, that is because there are very few books Amazon refuses to sell. And I'm thinking that the signers of the letter failed to list any of those very few because they mostly agree on their being too extreme to sell just as much as Amazon does.

Then there is this:

In 2022 alone, the American Library Association recorded 2,571 unique book titles that were targeted for censorship

OK. So how many of those 2,571 titles are sold, and not sold, at Amazon.com? Googling, I am failing to find the list of 2,571. All I keep on finding is most frequently challenged subsets of the list.

AFAIK Amazon sells all the books on the most frequently challenged lists. And until the letter signers, or American Library Association, uploads the full list of 2,571, there is no basis to think Amazon suppressed any of them.

Then this caught my eye:

Many authors and literary agents complain that one result of how Amazon uses its power is that it has been more difficult for new and diverse authors, and even for many established midlist authors, to be published by traditional publishers. Instead, publishers have been forced to focus more on “blockbuster” titles written by celebrities and well-established authors.

Even for-profit publishers sometimes publish books with poor commercial prospects because staff likes the book a lot. There probably are some commercial justifications for this, such as to please an editor who has brought in a lot of other titles which are very commercial. And, on the other side, there must be books with excellent commercial prospects that a big publishers didn't take on because an important editor despised the book. If Amazon was causing publisher profits to plummet then I could see that their monopoly power would change what gets published to make it more uniformly commercial. But, actually, publisher profits seem to be holding up fairly well in the Amazon era. So it's not plausible, and there's no evidence.

There may be legitimate monopolization concern with having the same big company publish books, and sell them. I won't cry if Amazon publishing ventures are broken out into a separate company. However, I see a lack of evidence that Amazon has effected the claimed harms.