A passage from Steve Coll’s New York Review of Books piece about Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a title bout Amazon strongarming publishers, which was recently caught in the crossfire of Jeff Bezos’ battle with Hachette:

“Jeff Bezos’s conceit is that Amazon is merely an instrument of an inevitable digital disruption in the book industry, that the company is clearing away the rust and cobwebs created by inefficient analog-era ‘gatekeepers’—i.e., editors, diverse small publishers, independent bookstores, and the writers this system has long supported. In Bezos’s implied argument, Amazon’s catalytic ‘creative destruction,’ in the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase, will clarify who will prosper in an unstoppably faster, more interconnected economy.

‘Amazon is not happening to book selling,’ Bezos once told Charlie Rose. ‘The future is happening to book selling.’ Yet the more Amazon uses its vertically integrated corporate power to squeeze publishers who are also competitors, the more Bezos’s claim looks like a smokescreen. And the more Amazon uses coercion and retaliation as means of negotiation, the more it looks to be restraining competition.

Toward the end of his account, Stone asks the essential question: ‘Will antitrust authorities eventually come to scrutinize Amazon and its market power?’ His answer: ‘Yes, I believe that is likely.’ It is ‘clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small and large,’ in Stone’s judgment.”