"Coll concedes that these publishers did, in fact, break the law, but excuses them on the grounds that had they not...

"Richer people in fancier cities have nicer things — surprise! — but given recent technology, those barriers could be lowered. Demand can now create supply, in the form of ebooks and print on demand, making books into a different sort of commodity. No book need ever be out of stock, or out of print, anywhere in the world. It used to be that if you were OK with people in Podunk having inferior access to books than people in Brooklyn, you were just a realist about the difficulties of making and shipping physical stuff. Now if you’re OK with that, you’re kind of an asshole. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests a degree of technical and managerial incompetence indistinguishable from active malice."

"To criticize Amazon, the publishers and their defenders must simultaneously insist that literature is essential for society, and that a sudden increase in its availability would be a catastrophe."

"It is not that people will stop writing or selling books that rich, well-educated people want to buy (an unlikely outcome, in this or any market.) Instead, he is concerned that publishing will become too easy, that there will be no one who can stop the publication of dreck, and by dreck he means books he and I and our fellow members of the highly educated class won’t approve of.

Now it’s a safe bet that Packer and I hate the same books — pop psychology, turgid genre fiction, heart-warming novels with relatable protagonists: “At a hotel in the Swiss alps, a penniless young beauty guards her secrets even while opening her heart…” He and I have been bred to hate that stuff. The difference is that while I disapprove of what other people read, I will defend to the death their right to read it. In a democracy, the only test any book should ever have to pass is whether the reader likes it."

"Obliqueness is necessary, because the essence of the argument — the only people in the world competent to oversee the publication of good writing are executives at five large corporations—won’t bear much direct scrutiny.

I say this as a beneficiary of that older system. I earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances for my last two books, to say nothing of the opportunities those books opened up, so the system has worked admirably well for me. However, I am a WASP, an Ivy League graduate, a tenured professor, and a member of the Sancerre-swilling East Coast Media Elite. Of course the existing system works well for me — it’s run by people like me, for people like me.

Despite my benefitting from it, I am unwilling to pretend that this system is beneficial for readers or for writers who lack my privilege. I’d always aspired to be a traitor to my class (though I’d hoped it would be for something a bit more momentous than retail book pricing), but treason is as treason does, so here goes: The reason my fellow elites hate the people who run Amazon is that they refuse to flatter our pretensions. In my tribe, this is a crime more heinous even than eating one’s salad with one’s dessert fork."