Why Is Jeff Bezos Targeting Public Libraries?

AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF BEZOS has never been seen in a top hat like the guy on the Monopoly board game, but, in every other way, he is a classic monopolist—the very model of a 21st century robber baron.

There’s at least one difference, however, between Bezos and robber barons of the past. While steel baron Andrew Carnegie became famous for building nearly 1,700 public libraries in small towns across the United States, Bezos has turned his wealth and power to strangling them.

One mark of the monopolist has always been predatory pricing—selling an item at a loss to force a competitor out of business. As the first company to perfect an online ordering and delivery system, Amazon used that advantage to destroy its independent, brick-and-mortar retail competition. As rival online merchants emerged, Amazon systematically underpriced them until they shuttered or fled to the “shelter” of the Amazon Marketplace.

Another classic monopolizing strategy is vertical integration—controlling the supply chain from production to point of sale. When streaming video became the next big thing, Amazon didn’t simply start a streaming rental service, it went into the movie production business.

And when e-books posed a threat to Amazon’s book business, the company combined those two monopolistic strategies by developing the Kindle e-reader, which Amazon sold at a loss, and then became a major e-book publisher. Now Amazon controls much of the e-book market, from book proposal to arrival of a text in the reader’s hands. As The Washington Post (also owned by Bezos) reported, six of the 10 best-selling e-books on Amazon were published by Amazon.

And that brings us back to the public libraries. Amazon’s publishing arm has never sold its e-books or audiobooks to public libraries. Libraries don’t pay enough, Amazon insisted—although the library rate was good enough for every other publisher in America. However, Amazon did allow libraries to buy its print copies.

Then came the pandemic. Libraries closed their doors. E-book loans became a lifeline for low-income readers. Meanwhile, Amazon’s quarterly profits tripled as in-person retail disappeared. You might think this would be a good time for Amazon to pick up a little goodwill by coming to terms with the libraries. But you’d be wrong. Amazon says it can’t cut a deal with libraries because it is protecting the income of its authors. Never mind that some of those authors, such as Michael Pollan, say they want their books in the public libraries.

One of Andrew Carnegie’s libraries was in my hometown of Greenwood, Miss., where sometime around eighth grade, I stumbled upon The Past That Would Not Die by Walter Lord (about the venality of the white resistance to desegregation in my home state) and 1984 by George Orwell—the scales fell from my young eyes.

That’s what public libraries are for. That’s why Ben Franklin started the first one in 1731, so that people without money or connections could be exposed to big ideas and think dangerous thoughts.

Today public libraries are one of the last American institutions untouched by the marketplace ethos. Libraries have become the United States’ internet service provider of last resort, a sort of “WeWork for the impoverished.” In fact, a public library is the kind of place where some harried, abused, and surveilled Amazon warehouse worker might use a public computer and stumble upon, say, a union organizing drive.