For fifty-five years that building in Barcelona, one of the city’s few examples of modern industrial architecture, was the head office of publishers Gustavo Gili. Now, after a refurbishment costing several million euros, it has become Amazon’s local centre of operations. Thanks to the technology of efficiency and immediacy that it houses, Barcelona is now one of forty-five cities in the world where the company guarantees delivery of products in an hour. The Canuda bookshop, which closed in 2013 after over eighty years of existence, is now a gigantic Mango clothing store. The Catalònia bookshop, after over a hundred, is now a McDonald’s with kitschy modernist decor. Expropriation is literal and physical, but also symbolic.
Typing “Amazon bookshop” into Google yields dozens of links to Amazon pages selling bookshelves. As I will never tire of repeating: Amazon is not a bookshop, it is a hypermarket. Its warehouses store books next to toasters, toys, or skateboards. In its new physical bookshops, books are placed face up, because they only display the six thousand books most sought after by their customers, far fewer than the number on the shelves of genuine bookshops that are prepared to take risks. Amazon is now considering whether to repeat the same operation with a chain of small supermarkets; as far as it is concerned, there is no difference between a cultural institution and an establishment that sells food and other goods.
Jeff Bezos has a history of lengthy, symbolic expropriations. He opted to sell books rather than electrical goods because he saw a niche in the market: no bookshop could accommodate his plan to offer every single title available. In the 1990s, there were few large-scale competitors (mainly Barnes & Noble and Borders) and distributors that had adapted to the digital age by incorporating ISBN numbers into their catalogues, which is why Bezos took an American Booksellers Association course and, in record time, appropriated the prestige books had accumulated over centuries.
Even today, when Amazon produces television series, offers music online, stocks spare parts for cars and motorcycles, and is considering getting into the prepaid cell-phone business, people continue to associate the brand with the object and symbol we call a book. Kindle, from its launch in 2007, has imitated the form and tone of ink and the printed page. Fortunately, for the moment they can’t reproduce the vegetable feel or smell of lignin on screen. Whether we like it or not, we still cannot remember with the same precision what we read on a screen: architectural transitions happen quickly; mental transitions, less so.
We all carry implants.
We all depend on that prosthetic: our cell phone.
We are all cyborgs: mainly human, slightly mechanical.
But we do not want to be robots.
The work Amazon employees do is robotic. It was ever thus: in 1994, the five people working in Jeff Bezos’s garage in Seattle were already obsessed with speed. The company has remained that way for twenty years, with many employees telling stories of stress, harassment, and inhuman work conditions, all to achieve a horrendous, machine-like efficiency.
The Amazonians are now helped by Kiva robots capable of lifting 340-kilo loads and that can move a metre and a half per second. Synchronized with the human labour force via an algorithm, their job is to lift shelves to facilitate product collection. After being gathered by the Kiva robots, purchased items move along a huge conveyor belt to the SLAM system (Scan, Label, Apply, Manifest), which performs the scanning and packaging.
Kiva robots and the SLAM system are the result of years of research. Amazon commissioned robot competitions at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation held in Seattle to perfect the processing of orders. Machines designed by MIT or the Technical University in Berlin competed to collect a rubber duck, a bag of Oreos, a toy dog, and a book in the shortest possible time. For Amazon, there is no substantial difference between those four items. They are equivalent commodities.
But not for us.
Amazon has gradually eliminated the human factor from its operations. In the early years, it employed people to write reviews of the books it sold; now the process of producing and placing a self-published book on their website isn’t even mediated. Amazon has robotized the chain of distribution and wants us, the consumers, to do the same.
But we won’t.
Because, for us, a book is a book is a book.
And reading a book—whether by choice or because it was given as a present—is a rite, the echo of an echo of an echo of something once sacred.
It’s to the great shame of Barcelona, a city with many excellent bookshops, that for twenty-four years the Europa Bookshop, run by the neo-Nazi Pedro Varela, was an important centre for the diffusion of anti-Semitic ideology. Fortunately, it closed down last September. Amazon sells a huge number of Mein Kampf editions, many with highly dubious prologues and notes. In fact, the World Jewish Congress has alerted the company to the dozens of negationist books it makes available with no obstacle to purchase. In other words, the Europa Bookshop was closed down for inciting hatred, amongst other crimes, but Amazon hasn’t been, even though it’s a crime to deny the Holocaust in many of the countries where it operates.
Amazon’s defence is that it is against censorship. That’s why it kept selling, despite the hue and cry, The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-lover’s Code of Conduct, by Phillip R. Greaves, although the title was eventually withdrawn. Something similar happened with Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers by David L. Riegel. Amazon used the same anti-censorship argument to defend books promoting the sensual love of children as it did for books promoting Nazi ideas. But the truth is that it censors or privileges books to suit its own interests. During its dispute with the Hachette Book Group in 2014, Hachette writer Ursula K. Le Guin denounced the fact that during the conflict her books were more difficult to find on Amazon.
Apparently the only thing that matters to Amazon is the speed and efficiency of its service. There is almost no human mediation. Everything is automatic, almost instantaneous. However, a massive economic and political structure exists behind of all those mechanical operations. A structure that puts pressure on publishing houses in order to maximize Amazon’s profits from its products, just as it does on skateboard manufacturers or frozen-pizza producers. A macro-structure determining visibility, access, and influence is shaping our future.
There are no booksellers on Amazon. Human book recommendations were eliminated because they were understood to be inefficient and because they torpedoed speed, the only value the company recognizes. Recommendations are now in the hands of an algorithm. An algorithm represents the height of fluidity. The machine transforms the customer into the prescriber. Customers who bought this product also bought. Self-publishing puts the process in the hands of the producer. Amazon eliminates intermediaries or makes them invisible as if they were so many robots. The company is like an ordering machine. It wants to be so streamlined as to seem invisible. Eliminating dispatch costs and haggling with clients means it gets the lowest possible price for the individual customer. Amazon seems cheap. Very cheap. But we now know that cheap means expensive in the long term. Very expensive. Because that invisibility is mere camouflage: everything is so quick and streamlined that there seems to be no middleman. But there is, and you pay for it with money and data.
Order, items, price, and dispatch: individual processes dissolve in the flow’s non-material logic. For Jeff Bezos—as for Google or Facebook—pixels and links have a material correlative: the world of things can work like the world of bytes. The three companies share an imperialist desire to conquer the planet by defending unlimited access to information, communication, and consumer goods while forcing their employees, and their publishing partners, to sign contracts with confidentiality clauses, hatching complex tax-avoidance strategies in the countries where they are based, and constructing a parallel, transversal global state, with its own rules and laws, its own bureaucracy and hierarchy, and its own police. And with its own intelligence services and its own ultra-secret laboratories. Google X, the research and development centre for that company’s future projects (from 2015 called Company X), is in a location not far from the firm’s central headquarters that for a long time remained undisclosed. Its five-star plan has now become a network of stratospheric balloons called Project Loon that will bring billions of people around the world online, many for the first time. A parallel project is Amazon Prime Air, the company’s new distribution network, which relies on 25-kilogram hybrid drones that are half-airplane, half-helicopter. In 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration changed its regulations to facilitate the use of drones for commercial purposes and to make it easy to qualify for a drone-pilot certificate. Long live lobbying! Let our skies fill with robotic distributors of Oreos, cuddly toy dogs, skateboards, toasters, rubber ducks and… books.
Unlike Facebook and Google, who’ve to wrestle with the possibility that your name and data may be false, and who do all they can to get your phone number because they failed to request it when you originally opened your account, Amazon, from the very start, has had all your data: real, physical, and legal. Even your credit card number. The company may not have as much access to your emotional and intellectual profile as Google or Facebook, but it knows almost everything about what you read, eat, or like to give as presents. It’s simple enough to deduce the state of your heart or brain from the goods you buy. Amazon’s empire was born from items that enjoy the most cultural prestige: books. It built the world’s biggest hypermarket behind a huge smokescreen shaped like a library.
In the beginning was a single piece of data.
In 1994, Jeff Bezos read that the World Wide Web was growing at a monthly rate of 2,300 percent. So he left his Wall Street job, moved to Seattle, and decided to start selling books on the internet.
Ever since, the data has been multiplying, piling up organically like a monster with tentacles, a storm cloud, or a second skin: we have been turning into data. We leave it behind us in thousands of everyday operations that trace our fingerprints on the internet. Our cell phones send it out. We are constantly delineating our autobiography with our every act or tap on our keyboards.
On World Book Day in 2018, Amazon revealed what the most frequently underlined sentences on their Kindle platform were. If you read on your device, the company can find out everything about your reading habits. On what page you gave up on a book. Which pages you finished. How fast you read. What you underline. The great advantage of a print book isn’t its portability, durability, autonomy, or even reading’s close relationship with the memorization and learning processes, but the fact that it is permanently disconnected.
When you read a print book, the energy and data you release through your eyes and fingers belong only to you. Big Brother can’t spy on you. Nobody can take that experience away or analyze and interpret it: it is yours alone.
That’s why Amazon launched its global campaign, the “Kindle Reading Fund,” ostensibly to encourage reading in poor countries, but in reality to accustom a new generation of consumers to read on screen, and to have the ability to study them and to get all five continents on its database. That’s why the Planeta Group—a multimedia corporation that welds together more than a hundred companies, making it the sixth biggest communications group in the world—is investing in business schools, academies, and university institutions: because it wants to maintain high levels of literacy to ensure future sales of the novels that win the Planeta Prize. We’ll see who wins out.
More specifically, let’s see if we all win.
Our moment has come.
Amazon appropriated our books. We will appropriate Amazon’s logic.
First, by convincing readers of the need to keep time on hold. Desire cannot be fulfilled immediately, because it then ceases to be desire, and becomes nothing at all. Desire should last. I must go to the bookshop; look for the book; find it; leaf through it; decide if the desire was warranted; perhaps abandon the book and nourish the desire for another; until I find it; or not; it wasn’t there; I order it; it will come in twenty-four hours; or in seventy-two; I’ll be able to give it a glance; I’ll finally buy it; perhaps I’ll read it, perhaps I won’t; perhaps I’ll let my desire go cold for a few days, weeks, months, or years; it will be there, in the right place on the right shelf; and I will always remember in which bookshop I bought it and why.
Because a bookshop gives you a memory of your purchase. If you buy on Amazon, on the other hand, the experience is the same as the one before and after it. The aura around each book you read becomes diffuse and blurred.
Once we have tamed time and desire, perhaps the moment will come when we go one step further and put a bit of everything on the shelves. Let’s not be afraid of diversity—it’s what makes us human. Let there be coffee and wine in our bookshops. Let there be bottles of Argentinian wine next to the complete works of Borges or Eterna Cadencia or Lucrecia Martel, Gotan Project CDs, Mercedes Sosa albums on vinyl, Martín Caparrós’s Hunger, and three Carlos Gardel biographies (even though he wasn’t Argentinian).
Or, better still, let’s forget national categories as we have forgotten Aristotelian strictures. Unities of time or space no longer exist. In the twenty-first century, frontiers make no sense. Let’s organize the shelves according to subject, let’s mix up books and comics, DVDs and CDs, games and maps. Let’s appropriate the same mix that exists in Amazon warehouses, but create meaning out of it. Itineraries of reading and travel. Because we might depend on screens, but we aren’t robots. And we need everyday bookshops so they can continue mapping all the distant things that allow us to situate ourselves in the world.
No: I’m not.
I’m not ingenuous. I watch Amazon series. I buy books I can’t get in any other way from iberlibro.com, which is owned by Abebooks.com, which Amazon bought in 2008. I constantly look for information on Google. And I am constantly giving my data, spruced up in one way or another, to Facebook as well.
I know they are the three tenors of globalization.
I know theirs is the music of the world.
But I believe in necessary, minimal resistance. In the preservation of certain rituals. In conversation, this is the art of time; in desire, this is time turned into art. Walking from my house to a bookshop, I whistle melodies that only I hear, that belong to nobody else.
I always buy books that aren’t out of print in independent, physical bookshops, ones I feel a bond with.
Which is what I did the other day. I went to Nollegiu (“Don’t read!”), my neighbourhood bookshop, and bought On the City, by the architect and thinker Rem Koolhas. And while I was drinking a cup of coffee, right there, I read: “Sometimes an ancient, unique city, like Barcelona, when it over-simplifies its identity, becomes Generic.” Transparent, he adds. Interchangeable: “like a logo.”
The book, by the way, was published by Gustavo Gili in this same city, when its head office was not what it is now.