The Companies That Are Killing Creativity

In 2012, Jeff Bezos claimed in a letter to Amazon shareholders that the company was serving humanity by eliminating old-fashioned “gatekeepers,” like book publishers, that stood between creators and their audiences. Today, nearly three decades since its founding, the company has indeed replaced these businesses with an even bigger and more centralized gatekeeper: Amazon itself.

Think about the art and culture you consume—the books, music, movies, and podcasts. You generally know the creators by name and credit them for their work. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, is clearly Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s novel, not her publisher’s. It’s certainly not Amazon’s novel.

But your relationship with—and, more specifically, your financial support for—Jeffers and other creators is not so straightforward. In their new book, , Rebecca Giblin, a professor at Melbourne Law School, and Cory Doctorow, a technology activist and best-selling science-fiction novelist, portray