Amazon's troubling reach

[Commentary] The issue isn't that Amazon has erased material from people's Kindles, or de-ranked gay and lesbian writers, but that it can. This is the problem with the digitized canon and the electronic frontier: It's mutable to the point of being vulnerable. We are asked to trust each other's goodwill, to believe in the commons, even though we know people and institutions try to rewrite history all the time. Does Amazon.com, as its detractors claim, want to control, or even censor, certain types of literature? As long as there's money to be made, I can't see why it would. But economics is a slippery territory, defined by self-interest rather than the public good. And that, as Amazon.com continues to remind us, makes for its own kind of memory hole.

[David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.]