The same culture that delivers you a book overnight is the same one that deprives you of the time to read it.

Hello. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Mark McGurl.

Mark is a professor of literature at Stanford University.

He's the author of the program era, post-war fiction and the rise of creative writing, and most recently,

Everything and Less, the novel in the age of Amazon. Now, in this conversation, we'll be speaking

about that most recent book, because, you know, Amazon started as this company that was selling

books and has moved into many other product lines and businesses since then, but we shouldn't ignore

the impact that it's had not just on the publishing industry, but on the book itself.

You know, in the same way that we can recognize how Amazon's e-commerce platform has kind

of transformed the way that a lot of people shop and the expectations that they have

around delivery times. Amazon's kind of colonization of the publishing industry has had a notable

effect, you know, really helping e-books to take off, launching the Kindle and Kindle direct

publishing to allow self-publishing on a scale that really wasn't possible before,

but also taking over much of the print book market in terms of selling the books because a lot

of people buy books from Amazon, not just e-books. And so Mark argues that in the process of doing that,

the book has become like less of this kind of physical object that contains information and more of

like a service that we expect to always be there and for more of it to be provided.

And that naturally has an impact on what the book or the novel itself actually looks like,

how it's structured and the ways that stories are told when it comes to fiction.

This is a topic that I've been interested in for quite a while, so I was really happy to have

this conversation with Mark, and I feel like you're going to learn a lot from it as well.

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