You too can be an Amazon book reviewer...Is that a paperback in your pocket?
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Invest in haste; repent between hard covers. Books about extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds will always find readers. The dot-com boom and bust of the 1990s has been chronicled in John Cassidy's Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era, David Denby's American Sucker, and J. David Kuo's dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath. Most of them could have been titled (after Dr. Laura): How Could You (or I) Do That?! James Marcus' Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.com Juggernaut (The New Press) is a different sort of book, not least because the company he describes still exists.
Marcus was neither an entrepreneur (like Kuo), nor an investor (Denby), and is not a scold (Cassidy). Instead, he was a struggling freelance book reviewer who in 1996 became Amazon.com's Employee #55, hired to help fill the fledgling site with content—book reviews, author interviews, etc.
One unforeseen consequence--collateral damage, if you will--of Amazon's rise has been the democratization of literary criticism. Everyone's a critic now. Anyone who has mastered the art of the SEND button, that is. Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and coherence are optional. Amazon's reviewers are there the fastest (if not with the mostest), and if you don't like what "A reader from Poughkeepsie" has to say, keep scrolling.
As Marcus relates, however, Amazon embraced the do-it-yourself ethos only later, of necessity. At first, two dozen drudges, including a former Village Voice Literary Supplement editor and Jacques Barzun's old copy editor, cranked out Guinness Book of World Record quantities of reviews, 50 words at a time. One hack once achieves 137 reviews in a week--a feat this reviewer cannot begin to contemplate.
Marcus, now translated to the rarefied (but increasingly irrelevant) literary environs of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, admits of this frenetic scribbling, "It sounded less than reviewing and more like a pie-eating contest." Still, he had tradition on his side: "Samuel Johnson dictating the Rambler essays directly to the printer. Balzac with his coffee, Kerouac with his speed." The first day on the job, he reviewed 17 Patrick O'Brien novels.
Marcus attests he was never ordered to give good reviews. But he always understood he was working for a book seller. And "what kind of salesman would point out the defects in his own merchandise?" Certainly not one who wanted to keep his job.
And Marcus was not a mere flunky. A 1999 Wall Street Journal article argued that Amazon editorial staffers were among the most powerful critics in the nation. Marcus was once even taken to an "undisclosed location" to interview Salman Rushdie, surely history's most ubiquitous recluse. But Amazon, despite its ever growing revenue, still wasn't making a profit. The editorial staff was slashed and Amazon's customers--delighted to write reviews for free--took up the slack. But Marcus couldn't break the habit. He created his own pseudonymous Amazon reviewer alter ego, and won $50 for a review, but then guiltily confessed his real identity.
Amazonia does drag a bit at times--Marcus allows himself far too many digressions, and skips around in time to little effect. But where New Yorker film critic David Denby in his memoir, American Sucker, comes off as self-pitying and self-absorbed--spending his and his ex-wife's savings to buy her half of the house and hopefully a bigger car--Marcus has retained his perspective.
"What had resembled a cosmic joke--striking it rich as a book reviewer--turned out to be a cosmic joke, as the price of Amazon stock collapsed," he writes. (It has since recovered, and Amazon has actually declared a quarterly profit.) But Marcus doesn't dwell on his lost paper fortune. The future of American culture is what really matters to him. Amazonia is a thoughtful and rewarding read.
But many, if not most, of those who pick it up will do so because they just can't read enough about America's Age of Alchemy. Here, Marcus does not disappoint: "It's hard to write about the Internet boom and bust without an insulating layer of irony. Without it, you're too exposed, somehow: you succumb to a kind of narrative hypothermia, start shivering, and lay down your pen. The fact is that for about five years, the rules were suspended. Nobody failed. Money rained down from the skies."
*****
Since Marcus' book was published, Amazon has since loosened its already slack editorial guidelines. The New York Daily News reports, "In line with 'Presidential election year politics,' Amazon says it'll allow personal attacks as long as they're not obscene." The move was apparently made in response to the heated reviews of Unfit for Command, the case against John Kerry by the Swift Boat vets. Amazon's reviews are already infamous for their often vitriolic (and, of course, often anonymous) attacks. Now the site will be more like a mudpit than a mere sandbox.
*****
It is said that a pretty face covers a multitude of sins. Just ask Penguin Books. Once a mark of distinction, it now seems intent on becoming the Maxim of the paperback industry. Men don't read much literature these days, so Penguin's "Good Booking" campaign touts the preposterous promise that their products make lads more bedworthy. The ad copy claims, "What women really want is a man with a Penguin." Take that, Dr. Freud. "You may not even need to read it, just bend the covers, let it stick out of your pocket and the book will do the talking!" A website, www.goodbooking.com, features a scantily-clad woman offering the possibility of £1,000 if she spots you bepenguined. Didn't someone once say that publishing was the second-oldest profession?
Now the company that pioneered the paperback classic has launched a new series, "Great Ideas." With Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, and Orwell included, the books seem like, well, a great idea. But Penguin can't resist the slide from the sublime to the ridiculous: "Bill Clinton read Marcus Aurelius and Thomas à Kempis to help him through Monicagate!" Sure he did, and Jimmy Carter's favorite composer was Rachmaninov.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her Web site on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
