Is Amazon Changing the Novel?
In the new literary landscape, readers are customers, writers are service providers, and books are expected to offer instant gratification.
By Parul Sheila
The triple-decker prevailed until, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Mudie’s became frustrated with a glut of books and began requesting single-volume novels from publishers. With the rise of mass-market paperbacks printed cheaply on pulp paper, new forms were born (pulp fiction, anyone?), with their own dictates, their own hooks and lures for the reader. But, then, style has always shadowed modes of distribution in the history of the novel, from magazine serials to the Internet. In “Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon” (Verso), the literary scholar Mark McGurl considers all the ways a new behemoth has transformed not only how we obtain fiction but how we read and write it—and why. “The rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge contemporary literary life as an adjunct to online retail,” he argues...
As book historians like Ted Striphas and Leah Price have written, there is nothing new in the notion of the book as a commodity; books were the first objects to be sold on credit. They were early to be bar-coded, allowing for inventory to be tracked electronically, which made them well suited to online retail. “Everything and Less” takes glancing notice of this history; McGurl’s real interest is in charting how Amazon’s tentacles have inched their way into the relationship between reader and writer. This is clearest in the case of K.D.P. The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/01/is-amazon-changing-the-novel-everything-and-less
That second item really surprised me.