It might not sound like much, but text-string searches represent the lowest impediment to the free flow of information. To be able to search a whole giant corpus at will for the needle of your desire in the Brobdingnagian cultural haystack means that your personal interests needn’t take a back seat to corporate imperatives of any kind. Full, absolute text searches should be the goal for all searchable databases. […] American business practice in our time consists not only in offering an attractive product, but also in throwing as many spanners as possible into the works of your competitors. The goal is not to become one among many, but to crush all alternatives. This may explain why, in the first dot-com boom that began in the mid-1990s and ended in April of 2001, so much money went to the acquisition and eventual strangling of so many promising mom-and-pop online startups. These businesses must not be allowed to grow, or they must be acquired, in order that markets might be captured by those who’d attracted the most power in the form of capital—not through any particular excellence of product, or of management. With the results that you see all around you. In the opinion of this former bookseller, Amazon represents a threat to the commons; a threat to libraries; a threat to independent publishing; a threat to an informed, intelligent public.