Phil Christman

As of right now, because Jeff Bezos wants a monopoly and will do what he has to do to get it, you can’t buy new books by America’s greatest writer from America’s biggest bookstore.

I’m sure that by the time I get around to really writing about the Amazon-Macmillan dustup, these two conditions will obtain:

1. It’ll be over;

2. Everything I’d have said will have been said by someone else to no damn effect whatsoever.

Still, just for what it’s worth, I’m so sickened by them right now that I don’t even want to look at their homepage. And though I already wasn’t buying a Kindle—the whole Orwell-erasure thing seemed so hilariously ominous I decided I shouldn’t require the universe to be so ham-fisted twice—I’m now done with the whole site for the time being. (Hopefully Ashley will let me delete our Amazon gift registry; for some reason she’s only excited about that pot-and-pan-bullshit registry from Williams-Sonoma anyway.)

There are important ethical/practical questions as to whether boycotts are effective, when they’re justified, etc. But this isn’t a boycott—this is me being angry. It makes no difference to the world, but it does make a difference to my blood pressure, whether Amazon’s noxious homepage ever appears on my laptop screen again. And maybe, on second thought, the blood-pressure test is the most practical way of deciding whether and when an institution ought to be boycotted. If so, Amazon has failed. Period.