Today, May 15, 2021, I went through my routine of selectively reading the Saturday New York Times. As I usually do, I looked at the Best Sellers list in the Book Review section, and I was pleased to see that one of my favorite books I have read in the last year, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, was #2 on the non-fiction list.
I also checked out the Editor’s Choices, as I usually do, and noticed that Amy Klobuchar’s ANTITRUST: Taking on Monopoly Power From the Gilded Age to the Digital Age was one of the nine book listed. I had meant to buy the book when it was published in late April, so I opened my Amazon account, clicked on books in the drop-down menu and typed in “antitrust amy klobuchar.”
The results: five summaries and reviews of Antitrust, but no original book. One result was titled A Fascinating Review of Antitrust By Amy Klobuchar: A Staggeringly Detailed History of Current Fights Against Monopolies in America. Kindle price: $4. You can guess from the title and the price that this was probably not a rigourous support of the book.
Why would Amazon not sell the original book? There can only be one answer: censorship. Amazon obviously didn’t like a well-researched book about antitrust (the New York Times review of Antitrust noted that there were 200 pages of footnotes).
Not only does not selling Antitrust reek of censorship, being unethical and stifling freedom of expression but it also seems just petty. Amazon should be better than that.
One of Amazon’s 14 core operating principles is “customer obsession,” and is probably the principle most people are familiar with. What message is Amazon sending to its customers by not selling a book by a respected United States Senator? Does Amazon think its book customers are not smart enough to realize Antitrust is being censored, ignored?
In Brad Stone’s new book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Amazon Unbound, Stone quotes Bezos as saying that it has been mistakes that have, to a large part, driven Amazon’s success. Even though this idea smells a lot like false humility, not selling Klobuchar’s Antitrust is one mistake that is not going to lead to success among Amazon’s discerning book buyers.
