For Kindle Nation citizens who are trying to make sense of all the hating and whining that the traditional publishing industry is directing at Amazon these days, Ruth Franklin has a smart, thoughtful piece in The New Republic’s Books and Arts section entitled The READ: In Defense of Amazon – The corporate behemoth isn’t to blame for the book industry’s failures.  You can read it by clicking on the link or have it pushed directly to your Kindle with a $2.25-per-month subscription or 14-day free trial of the Kindle edition.

Franklin, a senior editor at TNR, concludes her piece thus:

But Amazon is a quintessential capitalist enterprise, and it cannot be faulted for exploiting the free-market system that, for better or worse, we have embraced. It offers people things they want to buy at prices they want to pay, and in so doing, it puts out of business other enterprises that are not able to match its terms. Other than continuing to make sure that Amazon’s practices fall within the bounds of what regulation we have—particularly antitrust laws—there’s not much to be done. (Although it does seem unnecessary to deliberately increase Amazon’s monopoly, as the Wylie Agency did last week with its controversial introduction of a digital publishing venture that makes classic books by the agency’s venerated stable of writers—including Bellow, Nabokov, and Rushdie—available exclusively through Amazon.) I’m not ashamed to admit that I buy books from Amazon when it’s convenient, as well as from Barnes and Noble, independent bookstores, people on the street, or whoever else happens to have what I’m looking for. And to Jeff Bezos and everyone else who brings books to the world I say: thank you.