Against Amazon: and Other Essays [Paperback]

A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK

Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges & A pleasing labyrinth where you cant get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers.

Picking up where the widely praisedBookshops: A Readers Historyleft off,Against Amazon and Other Essaysexplores the increasing pressures of Amazon and other new technologies on bookshops and libraries. In essays on these vital social, cultural, and intellectual spaces, Jorge Carri?n travels from London to Geneva, from Miamis Little Havana to Argentina, from his own well-loved childhood library to the rosewood shelves of Jules Vernes Nautilus and the innovative spaces that characterize South Koreas bookshop renaissance. Including interviews with writers and librariansincluding Alberto Manguel, Iain Sinclair, Luigi Amara, and Han Kang, among othersAgainst Amazonis equal parts a celebration of books and bookshops, an autobiography of a reader, a travelogue, a love letterand, most urgently, a manifesto against the corrosive influence of late capitalism.

Against Amazon: Seven Arguments, One Manifesto

I.Because I dont want to be an accomplice to symbolic expropriation.

For 55 years that building in Barcelona, one of citys few examples of modern industrial architecture, was the head office of the publishers Gustavo Gili. Now, after a refurbishment costing several million euros, it has become Amazons local center of operations. Thanks to the technology of efficiency and immediacy it houses, Barcelona is now one of the 45 cities in the world where the company guarantees delivery of products in an hour. The Canuda bookshop that shut in 2013 after over 80 yealƒ@