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"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."