"In
my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction,
Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like
one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are
either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers
dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors
responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters
and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out
hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. 
But
what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and
tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of
social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in
depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the
printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote
when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary
reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel
levels?"
But
what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and
tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of
social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in
depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the
printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote
when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary
reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel
levels?"
--Jonathan Franzen in a Guardian essay called "What's Wrong with the Modern World"
(We recommend printing out the full article if you want to really get down into it--its 15 pages long!)
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