Amazon, George Orwell, and 1984

Thank you to the New York Times for high-lighting the accurate Orwellian quotes mentioned below and to Amazon for providing the inaccurate Orwellian quote mentioned below.

I recently received an email from Kindle Direct Publishing in which Amazon told me how the book industry hated mass-market paperbacks when they were introduced in the 1930s. To back their argument they quoted George Orwell as follows:

“The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.”

When Orwell wrote that line, he was celebrating paperbacks published by Penguin, not urging suppression or collusion. Here is what George Orwell actually wrote in The New English Weekly on March 5, 1936:

“The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.”

Orwell then went on: “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”