600bars's review
5.0
This book is about the ways in which Amazon has changed the novel, and the literary landscape at large. The author’s previous book was about what he considers the previous big shift, which was the proliferation of MFA programs after WW2. McGurl argues that Amazon is changing everything about literary life, from the material changes in the book industry to the purpose of fiction. He even claims that Amazon itself is a sort of grand literary project.
(Side note–McGurl uses words like “relentless” to describe Amazon, but he never mentioned the fact that when you go to www.relentless.com it sends you to Amazon bc that was its original name. I wish he knew this anecdote!! It’s so perfect! It’s a little *too* on the nose which is why Bezos probably decided to change the name.)
I found this argument very compelling, both as someone who loves to read and as someone who works in the book industry–in fact, to quote the book, I’m viewing the industry from its “lowest rung” (actually I am lower than low working in the secondhand market!). As usual I got extremely carried away. I wrote literally 8 single spaced pages examining my own reading habits, the meaning of my labor and leisure time. There’s also a long portion where I searched through my family’s amazon records to 1999 and examined the ways in which Amazon has penetrated my own domestic sphere… It got way too unwieldy and personal and would be very boring for anyone to read. In keeping with McGurl’s assertion that one of the main functions of both reading and writing today is that of therapy, I would say I ticked my therapeutic boxes by writing all that nonsense and can get to talking about the actual book.
McGurl correctly points out that fiction is “a therapeutic instrument for managing the problem of opportunity cost” 140. Once you have made a choice, you have limited your own freedom by forfeiting your ability to do all of the choices you didn’t make. This produces a lot of anxiety, especially because we are told that we can Have It All and it seems like everyone else is having a far more exciting life. Fiction can help alleviate this by being “an alternative to the actual world inhabited by readers, which fictions amount, in their consumption, to affective experiential add-ons or supplements” (138). This has been true to some extent since the first story was ever told, but the Age of Amazon has heralded a therapeutic turn in which the stories we consume MUST be pleasing, therapeutic, or pleasurable. KDP’s own guidelines state that they cannot include content that would be “disappointing to the reader”, because that would lead to unhappy customers. A book's worth is now measured in sales rather than other metrics such as awards or prestige. On one hand, elitism and gatekeeping are ostensibly bad. On the other hand, letting the market be the arbiter of what books are “the best” means books cater to what’s palatable and easily consumable. The latest James Patterson has always outsold any highbrow experimental work, so this isn’t a totally new phenomenon. But the lines between “highbrow” (literary fiction) and “lowbrow'' (genre fiction) are blurring, for better or for worse.
In the Age of Amazon fiction becomes something to serve and soothe, pure escapism. The reader is a customer above anything else. “These customers are largely not in school, and when they reflect on the works they read– for instance, when they write a review on Goodreads, they do so as customers, not students” (173). This is why when you look at most Goodreads reviews you’ll see things like people getting mad that a character was unlikeable, or conflating characters doing bad things with the work itself being bad. I’ve written at length about this in other reviews, so I don’t want to rehash too much of this. I just wish I’d had this language to describe fiction as a tool to manage the anxiety of opportunity cost when I was trying to express what feels bleak to me about the popularity of Multiverse Narratives like the Midnight Library and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
McGurl spends a large portion of this book examining the functions of genre fiction, and argues that literary fiction has been subsumed as just another genre. (I have more to say about literary fiction being genre fiction when I finish Beach Read, bc that book coincidentally explores this very idea). Because capitalism always needs people to want More to continue making a profit, it is necessary to create more identities to make more micromarkets. This division into smaller and smaller categories is everywhere, but is notably present in the proliferation of genre fiction. Amazon has something like 10,000 genres with their accordant bestseller lists. McGurl takes a look at several genres and their functions, proposing a dialectic between the Epic found in fantasy/sci fi (sprawling, expansive social network) and the Romance (shrinking the world down to a social world of 2). I really appreciated that McGurl takes all of the works he discusses seriously. He’s looking at things like “Adult Baby Diaper Lover” fiction, and he analyzes them thoughtfully without being snobby about it.
In order for a novel to help us manage the problem of limited time, the novel must condense and dilate time within its pages. Even the most “realistic” novels like Knausgaard’s My Struggle series cannot capture every single detail. It would be like that one Borges story where they try to make a map more and more detailed until the map is just as big as the world. Reading a book is so time consuming in an age where people want instant gratification and have very little leisure time, which is why it’s almost odd that it’s still such a popular pastime. “We cannot read more than one book at a time, not literally, and we will not live long enough to read even a fraction of the books we might enjoy reading, the overstuffed kindle ereader or iPad is at once a world historically powerful condensation of potential literary experience and a little tombstone prophesying the rapidly approaching day of our death” (137).
This line really got to me lol. I spend so much time making my book lists (i am in the top 1% users of ListChallenge.com) while knowing it is physically and temporally impossible for me to finish them. I own a shit ton of books and buy more all the time because of my job. I look at them and wonder which ones I will die without reading. The time crunch feels extra pressing bc everything’s on the verge of collapse and climate disaster so the future feels uncertain. I always scoff at people who buy funko pops because they seem so useless to me, but I am functionally doing the exact same thing. I buy these objects that I find beautiful and I want them on a shelf because of what they express about my (idealized) self.
I work in a used bookstore, and we throw away 2 dumpsters full to the brim of books every week. My first week I was horrified at having to throw books in the garbage, because I love books so much. (They are in fact recycled, but it still felt sacrilegious because I upheld books as a sacred object). Now I feel something like glee when I throw them away, like I’m helping clean the world of clutter. People get mad at us, but sometimes we can’t even fit all the books in the dumpsters and have to fill bins and boxes because 2 pickups per week is not enough. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS! It is staggering thinking of the sheer amounts of information going in the trash every day. I imagine how much time all these writers spent writing these books and feel overwhelmed by what a colossal waste of time it was. (Even though when I sit and think about what constitutes a “waste” of time I wouldn’t actually consider it a waste, but this line of thinking could lead to 5 more paragraphs so let me stop). McGurl’s final chapter addresses this surplus of fiction.The advent of direct publishing has removed barriers to getting your book out there, and resultantly there are millions of novels being published every year. Given the limited time available, a huge majority of these works will never be read. It’s just not possible. I was already overwhelmed given that my job is basically ”literary garbageman”, and hadn’t even considered how much fiction exists in servers. I also yearn for a world that “doesn’t need so much fiction, at least not as we know it, having progressed beyond a desire for the forms of therapy it currently offers” (258).
I read so much, but I’m often not learning, I’m just consuming. There is a false notion that reading is a higher pursuit than watching TV, but for me much of the reading I do is equivalent to binge watching. I am consuming content. Even when I read nonfiction I often feel like I’m just consuming the facts. The great thing about this book is that it doesn’t moralize too much about whether this is a bad thing or not. There are worse ways to spend your time. (Interestingly, I spend very little leisure time reading. It’s almost all done while eating or listening to audiobooks doing chores/work— all things I HAVE to do that I try to make more pleasant by doing something I want to do at the same time). I could keep going, but at this point my review is becoming like the map in the Borges story in that I’m going to keep addressing points until the review covers every single sentence of the book. Needless to say, I really liked this book and got a lot out of it. I am a satisfied customer.
(Side note–McGurl uses words like “relentless” to describe Amazon, but he never mentioned the fact that when you go to www.relentless.com it sends you to Amazon bc that was its original name. I wish he knew this anecdote!! It’s so perfect! It’s a little *too* on the nose which is why Bezos probably decided to change the name.)
I found this argument very compelling, both as someone who loves to read and as someone who works in the book industry–in fact, to quote the book, I’m viewing the industry from its “lowest rung” (actually I am lower than low working in the secondhand market!). As usual I got extremely carried away. I wrote literally 8 single spaced pages examining my own reading habits, the meaning of my labor and leisure time. There’s also a long portion where I searched through my family’s amazon records to 1999 and examined the ways in which Amazon has penetrated my own domestic sphere… It got way too unwieldy and personal and would be very boring for anyone to read. In keeping with McGurl’s assertion that one of the main functions of both reading and writing today is that of therapy, I would say I ticked my therapeutic boxes by writing all that nonsense and can get to talking about the actual book.
McGurl correctly points out that fiction is “a therapeutic instrument for managing the problem of opportunity cost” 140. Once you have made a choice, you have limited your own freedom by forfeiting your ability to do all of the choices you didn’t make. This produces a lot of anxiety, especially because we are told that we can Have It All and it seems like everyone else is having a far more exciting life. Fiction can help alleviate this by being “an alternative to the actual world inhabited by readers, which fictions amount, in their consumption, to affective experiential add-ons or supplements” (138). This has been true to some extent since the first story was ever told, but the Age of Amazon has heralded a therapeutic turn in which the stories we consume MUST be pleasing, therapeutic, or pleasurable. KDP’s own guidelines state that they cannot include content that would be “disappointing to the reader”, because that would lead to unhappy customers. A book's worth is now measured in sales rather than other metrics such as awards or prestige. On one hand, elitism and gatekeeping are ostensibly bad. On the other hand, letting the market be the arbiter of what books are “the best” means books cater to what’s palatable and easily consumable. The latest James Patterson has always outsold any highbrow experimental work, so this isn’t a totally new phenomenon. But the lines between “highbrow” (literary fiction) and “lowbrow'' (genre fiction) are blurring, for better or for worse.
In the Age of Amazon fiction becomes something to serve and soothe, pure escapism. The reader is a customer above anything else. “These customers are largely not in school, and when they reflect on the works they read– for instance, when they write a review on Goodreads, they do so as customers, not students” (173). This is why when you look at most Goodreads reviews you’ll see things like people getting mad that a character was unlikeable, or conflating characters doing bad things with the work itself being bad. I’ve written at length about this in other reviews, so I don’t want to rehash too much of this. I just wish I’d had this language to describe fiction as a tool to manage the anxiety of opportunity cost when I was trying to express what feels bleak to me about the popularity of Multiverse Narratives like the Midnight Library and Everything Everywhere All At Once.
McGurl spends a large portion of this book examining the functions of genre fiction, and argues that literary fiction has been subsumed as just another genre. (I have more to say about literary fiction being genre fiction when I finish Beach Read, bc that book coincidentally explores this very idea). Because capitalism always needs people to want More to continue making a profit, it is necessary to create more identities to make more micromarkets. This division into smaller and smaller categories is everywhere, but is notably present in the proliferation of genre fiction. Amazon has something like 10,000 genres with their accordant bestseller lists. McGurl takes a look at several genres and their functions, proposing a dialectic between the Epic found in fantasy/sci fi (sprawling, expansive social network) and the Romance (shrinking the world down to a social world of 2). I really appreciated that McGurl takes all of the works he discusses seriously. He’s looking at things like “Adult Baby Diaper Lover” fiction, and he analyzes them thoughtfully without being snobby about it.
In order for a novel to help us manage the problem of limited time, the novel must condense and dilate time within its pages. Even the most “realistic” novels like Knausgaard’s My Struggle series cannot capture every single detail. It would be like that one Borges story where they try to make a map more and more detailed until the map is just as big as the world. Reading a book is so time consuming in an age where people want instant gratification and have very little leisure time, which is why it’s almost odd that it’s still such a popular pastime. “We cannot read more than one book at a time, not literally, and we will not live long enough to read even a fraction of the books we might enjoy reading, the overstuffed kindle ereader or iPad is at once a world historically powerful condensation of potential literary experience and a little tombstone prophesying the rapidly approaching day of our death” (137).
This line really got to me lol. I spend so much time making my book lists (i am in the top 1% users of ListChallenge.com) while knowing it is physically and temporally impossible for me to finish them. I own a shit ton of books and buy more all the time because of my job. I look at them and wonder which ones I will die without reading. The time crunch feels extra pressing bc everything’s on the verge of collapse and climate disaster so the future feels uncertain. I always scoff at people who buy funko pops because they seem so useless to me, but I am functionally doing the exact same thing. I buy these objects that I find beautiful and I want them on a shelf because of what they express about my (idealized) self.
I work in a used bookstore, and we throw away 2 dumpsters full to the brim of books every week. My first week I was horrified at having to throw books in the garbage, because I love books so much. (They are in fact recycled, but it still felt sacrilegious because I upheld books as a sacred object). Now I feel something like glee when I throw them away, like I’m helping clean the world of clutter. People get mad at us, but sometimes we can’t even fit all the books in the dumpsters and have to fill bins and boxes because 2 pickups per week is not enough. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS! It is staggering thinking of the sheer amounts of information going in the trash every day. I imagine how much time all these writers spent writing these books and feel overwhelmed by what a colossal waste of time it was. (Even though when I sit and think about what constitutes a “waste” of time I wouldn’t actually consider it a waste, but this line of thinking could lead to 5 more paragraphs so let me stop). McGurl’s final chapter addresses this surplus of fiction.The advent of direct publishing has removed barriers to getting your book out there, and resultantly there are millions of novels being published every year. Given the limited time available, a huge majority of these works will never be read. It’s just not possible. I was already overwhelmed given that my job is basically ”literary garbageman”, and hadn’t even considered how much fiction exists in servers. I also yearn for a world that “doesn’t need so much fiction, at least not as we know it, having progressed beyond a desire for the forms of therapy it currently offers” (258).
I read so much, but I’m often not learning, I’m just consuming. There is a false notion that reading is a higher pursuit than watching TV, but for me much of the reading I do is equivalent to binge watching. I am consuming content. Even when I read nonfiction I often feel like I’m just consuming the facts. The great thing about this book is that it doesn’t moralize too much about whether this is a bad thing or not. There are worse ways to spend your time. (Interestingly, I spend very little leisure time reading. It’s almost all done while eating or listening to audiobooks doing chores/work— all things I HAVE to do that I try to make more pleasant by doing something I want to do at the same time). I could keep going, but at this point my review is becoming like the map in the Borges story in that I’m going to keep addressing points until the review covers every single sentence of the book. Needless to say, I really liked this book and got a lot out of it. I am a satisfied customer.
boithorn's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
This book really meandered and chugged in places, but the second half did a good job of defining the landscape of literature in the age of Amazon.
talypollywaly's review
I stopped, picked it up for 30 more pages, and stopped again. My god, what an absolute slog through incohesiveness. The man does not know how to use punctuation if his life depended on it. Nor is this man capable of using the perfectly fine, simple layman vocabularly that would just as nicely get his point across, rather than complicated words that mean nothing to people reading a book NOT published by a university.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content
he chooses to focus a lot of his analysis on 50 Shades of Grey and adult diaper erotica, so... yeah.balkeyeston's review
2.0
What if you took the most pretentious person in the literary community and forced him to write about the state of the novel in the Amazonian marketplace? The product you might find would likely be this book.
I don't like writing negative reviews at all, but I felt it might be wise to recommend folks to another title (or titles...or just creep around on Google and Amazon all the time like me) that cover/s this subject area with a less conceited air.
There are a few great novels well worth analyzing that have risen through the ranks of the Amazon market and KDP, but McGurl doesn't cover any of them. He prefers to navel-gaze at the lost art of high-brow prose and cite Fifty Shades of Grey every chance he can get, rather than mention other hard-hitting examples such as:
· Andy Weir's online debut of The Martian,
· further contemporary literary works that are packaged as once-in-a-lifetime Instagram pop-ups (looking at you, Beautiful World...),
· the production and publishing structures of KDP/Little A/other Amazon imprints,
· the rise of Bookshop as the more socialist interconnected alternative to book-buying, and
· the endless disputes of ebook embargoes between Amazon, libraries, and the big four pubs.
I was quite looking forward to reading this book after having read The Program Era in grad school and how the MFA revolution created a whole literary industrial pipeline of white male banality. It seems as if McGurl was thrown a lot of money to research how Amazon is infiltrating the book publishing world, and all he spent it on was a butt-load of ebooks to read and call research in itself.
And no, this review won't tank his spot here on Goodreads (not that it matters to him), so I'm not losing sleep over bringing up the book's failings here. Until another book comes around, it looks like Merchants of Culture will have to suffice...
I don't like writing negative reviews at all, but I felt it might be wise to recommend folks to another title (or titles...or just creep around on Google and Amazon all the time like me) that cover/s this subject area with a less conceited air.
There are a few great novels well worth analyzing that have risen through the ranks of the Amazon market and KDP, but McGurl doesn't cover any of them. He prefers to navel-gaze at the lost art of high-brow prose and cite Fifty Shades of Grey every chance he can get, rather than mention other hard-hitting examples such as:
· Andy Weir's online debut of The Martian,
· further contemporary literary works that are packaged as once-in-a-lifetime Instagram pop-ups (looking at you, Beautiful World...),
· the production and publishing structures of KDP/Little A/other Amazon imprints,
· the rise of Bookshop as the more socialist interconnected alternative to book-buying, and
· the endless disputes of ebook embargoes between Amazon, libraries, and the big four pubs.
I was quite looking forward to reading this book after having read The Program Era in grad school and how the MFA revolution created a whole literary industrial pipeline of white male banality. It seems as if McGurl was thrown a lot of money to research how Amazon is infiltrating the book publishing world, and all he spent it on was a butt-load of ebooks to read and call research in itself.
And no, this review won't tank his spot here on Goodreads (not that it matters to him), so I'm not losing sleep over bringing up the book's failings here. Until another book comes around, it looks like Merchants of Culture will have to suffice...
katherinevarga's review
challenging
informative
The prose is a bit academic and dense and some parts I skimmed over, but I enjoyed the general discussion. Made me reflect on myself as a book consumer: what service am I looking for when I read? Therapy? I was also fascinated by all the erotic genre niches available through Kindle Direct Publishing.