If you’ve been lucky enough to spend the lockdown reading, you probably lined Jeff Bezos’ pocket. Even though books make up just a sliver of Amazon’s total business (less than 7 percent of the company’s $386 billion revenue now comes from the commodity with which it started), Amazon’s cut of the book business just keeps growing. About half of all paperback and hardback purchases in the United States are made on Amazon, as are nine out of 10 e-books.
For those of us who stop to wonder about the company that advertised those books to us and trucked them to our door, Amazon will also deliver. On my Kindle, I downloaded Brad Stone’s perky corporate history “Amazon Unbound” (2021). Through Amazon’s subsidiary Audible, I listened to Alec MacGillis’s exposé of union busting and tax evasion, “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” (2021).
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