I trust my readers to be persons of agency and ability who can acquire any book they desire from any bookseller they choose, no matter the links provided. Over the years, I have linked to Amazon, IndieBound, Bookshop.org, McNally Jackson, and AbeBooks — always alongside a link to a public library source — and have watched readers over and over opt for Amazon by orders of magnitude. I have ultimately kept those links as the primary book source for three reasons braided into a moral tightrope I have tried my best to walk consciously, if precariously, in my two decades of writing about and around books on the Internet (and occasionally writing books myself).

The first and most significant reason has to do with the relationship of the present to the past — most books I write about are years, decades, sometimes centuries old. They are simply not stocked by independent booksellers. They are, however, available via Amazon’s so-called Third-Party Marketplace — the world’s largest platform for second-hand booksellers, ranging from large nonprofits like Better World Books to tiny mom-and-pop shops in small towns who may get a dozen customers a month at their physical location, but reach millions online with none of the overhead. (A friend’s dad is a used bookseller in rural Texas and his business has been transformed by this marketplace.) My desire to save such books from obscurity is why I launched Marginalian Editions in collaboration with McNally Jackson, my favorite independent bookseller and publisher.

The second reason is a singular to our time: For in-print books, more than half of readers choose the Audible or Kindle edition if available, which Amazon alone carries.

The third reason, which is the most morally menacing, has to do with the future’s relationship to the present. We are dealing with a machine of astonishing immensity and complexity. When a book rises in Amazon’s rankings, it sets into motion a Rube Goldberg sequence of effects. The mindless recommendation algorithms begin placing it before readers who have never heard and might never hear of it otherwise, further adding to the momentum of its ascent. New York Times bestseller lists, which do rely on other sources as well, factor in Amazon pre-sales and sales rankings. Libraries — which are the country’s biggest buyer of books — look to them to decide how many orders of a book to place with the publisher. All of this has a tremendous impact on how many copies a book sells, which in turn determines whether and in what volume it goes into another printing.

The cruelty of our time is that there is no way out of the paradox without dismantling technocapitalism itself. The consolation is that we might be able to use the machine against itself. We influence the algorithms with the sum of our individual purchases. If we can raise a few books of substance above the morass of cookbooks and self-help currently passing for literature, then maybe, just maybe, we stand a chance of saving the life of the mind from death by commodity.

This, of course, is just my experience with the particular types of books I read and write about on The Marginalian, which remains just the personal project of a single book-lover with a peculiar taste for books from the infrared and ultraviolet edges of literature far beyond the narrow band of bestsellers in the visible light of the mainstream.