You'll probably find this book about the ruthlessness of Amazon at a sharp discount on Amazon

Do you love Amazon? I have to admit that I do, and that I buy books from it far more often than I buy them anywhere else — or bought them in the pre-internet era — and sometimes music, and occasionally kitchen items, and even bedding. I particularly like the ‘1-Click’ payment system, and the choice of price offers down to as little as a penny plus the postage. I’m not offended by emails telling me what else I might like to buy, and the software’s so smart that they’re quite often right.

And yet as an author, and a shareholder in a publishing venture, I can see what a monster Amazon has become since it fulfilled its first order (for a copy of Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter) in Seattle on 3 April 1995. Not only has it undermined the high-street book trade and brutalised the publishing industry, but in its urge to be the ‘everything store’ of the title of Brad Stone’s history, it has meted out the same treatment and worse on the supply chain of every other sector it has touched.