If you're from a small community whose town was damaged by big box stores and then killed off by Amazon, or if you are an environmentalist upset by Amazon trucks making delivering of toothbrushes in cardboard packaging big enough to fit a microwave, or if you believe that workers should be treated like humans and paid a livable wage unavailable to Amazon's warehouse slaves, then you may want to join me in boycotting Amazon for, yet, another reason. From WaPo:
. . . [Amazon] has also become a publishing powerhouse — and it won’t sell downloadable versions of its more than 10,000 e-books or tens of thousands of audiobooks to libraries. That’s right, for a decade, the company that killed bookstores has been starving the reading institution that cares for kids, the needy and the curious.
. . . . Librarians have been no match for the beast. When authors sign up with a publisher, it decides how to distribute their work. With other big publishers, selling e-books and audiobooks to libraries is part of the mix — that’s why you’re able to digitally check out bestsellers like Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land.” Amazon is the only big publisher that flat-out blocks library digital collections. Search your local library’s website, and you won’t find recent e-books by Amazon authors Kaling, Dean Koontz or Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Nor will you find downloadable audiobooks for Trevor Noah’s “Born a Crime,” Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Michael Pollan’s “Caffeine.”
Did I mention how many billions of dollars Jeff Bezos has added to his wealth during the pandemic? Huffington Post reported in January that
Jeff Bezos could have personally paid each of Amazon’s 876,000 employees a one-off $105,000 bonus ... and still be as wealthy as he was at the beginning of the pandemic.
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