Blurring the lines?

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The Hosseini deal is just the latest instance of Amazon.com reinventing itself in the face of a rapidly changing online culture. Already, the bookseller is offering a series called Amazon Shorts, featuring self-contained exclusive works in which writers like Jim Crace, Melissa Fay Greene and David McCullough explore some signature themes. (Go to the Amazon books page and scroll down the far left column to ‘More to Discover’ to see the Amazon Shorts collection.)

Yet if all this makes for terrific marketing, it also raises tricky questions about the boundaries between publishers, booksellers and consumers. That’s only heightened by Amazon’s decision to release early copies of ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ to its Top 100 Reviewers, ‘a collection of Amazon.com’s leading customer reviewers, in order to share this book with new and previous fans of his work.’ Setting aside the idea of a select group of customers getting preferential treatment, it’s discomforting to see readers treated like advance scouts in a publicity juggernaut. Who, exactly, is working whom here? And what does it say about how publishers and booksellers view their audience?

— David L. Ulin 5/02/07