Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I really enjoyed this in-depth exploration of how the very existence of Amazon and its business model has changed fiction itself – if indeed it has. There was much I agreed with in the book, but much I disagreed with, which perhaps makes the book even more worthwhile as it gets the reader to think – deeply or casually – about the issues raised. The author seems pretty anti-Amazon overall and accuses it of being responsible for a downturn in literary merit and value, only caring “that the books get sold”, which seems to me to be a not unreasonable stance – Amazon is a business, after all, there to sell, not to uphold literary standards. According to McGurk, Amazon has blurred the lines between genre fiction and literary fiction – but has it? It seems to me that Amazon has enabled readers to read and write the sort of book they want to read and write – what’s wrong with that? I certainly was amazed to discover so many genres now available such as ABLD (Adult Baby Diaper Love). Who knew? Well, I do now, and if I’m not tempted to read them I don’t feel any need to disapprove of such books being available. If Amazon enables people to find the sorts of reading matter they want, then good on Amazon. More books to cater to more tastes. I don’t see any subsequent downturn in literary fiction – just more people reading more books. The writing in this book, moreover, leaves a lot to be desired, being overly wordy and academic, often getting bogged down in the arguments, and it would have been more convincing if the writing had been more succinct. The aspects of Amazon that McGurk sees as negative, I see as positive – more books, lower prices, easy availability, easy self-publishing. So I remain unconvinced that Amazon has changed fiction. Its distribution and availability, yes, but not literature itself. Nevertheless I found this a thought-provoking and illuminating read and recommend it to all bibliophiles or potential authors as it certainly raises some important and relevant issues.

Sorry, this one is not for me. I struggled to maintain an interest in reading it, but just could not push through. Finally, after repeated attempts, I had to give up. It is not fair to post a review on a book that I did not finish, so I am just going to leave it here.

There have been plenty of books about the business impact of Amazon, and to be honest you probably don't need to read any of them anymore, it being the sort of non-fiction truism that's now accessible more or less by osmosis. This is something sideways and stranger – an investigation of Amazon's effect on literature. Because after all, it did begin as a bookshop, before it rechristened itself the Everything Store, and for McGurl, that's still significant, just as it matters that Amazon's foundation was inspired by The Remains Of The Day, or that the Kindle began as 'Project Fiona', an attempt to emulate The Diamond Age. After all, he notes, are we not at a point where the new protagonist who has replaced the bourgeois individual as culture's focus is not, as was once hoped by some, the masses - but the corporation itself? Like a lot of ideas here, in summary this can sound a little 'makes u think' – but more often than not, McGurl does make a plausible case for his theories as at least worth considering, if not always fully buying into.

Which is not to say Everything And Less is perfect, not by a long shot. His previous book suggested creative writing courses as the factor defining modern fiction, and in places you get the sense of him as slightly embarrassed to be coming up with a new claimant so soon – the parable of The Boy Who Cried Unified Field Theory. Then too, he does his best not to fall into the short-sighted, ahistorical wittering which ebooks and such can so easily occasion in those who like to think of themselves as literary, and instead reveal themselves as merely parochial, but doesn't always succeed. So yes, a lot of self-published Kindle fiction does come in series, but can we really talk about a transition towards literature as a mass, as against a presumed past of individual and discrete books, when such firmly canonical authors as Proust and Zola are known largely for series fiction? Yeah, call it roman-fleuve if you think you're fooling anyone, whatever; we all know that is to series as freedom fighter is to terrorist. He's read so widely, and is full of so much cool and weird information, yet he keeps referring (in my Netgalley ARC, at any rate – hopefully the finals will correct it) to Twilight as a trilogy. And more than once we get references to Max Weber's thoughts on the 'acetic' character of Protestantism, which I suspect are meant to read as 'ascetic', though it can't be denied the sect's most characteristic manifestations can be quite vinegary. There are also occasional lapses into theory, and not always the good stuff. Yes, even here, in a field more strewn with absolute rot than zombie apocalypse fiction, McGurl does manage to unearth some gems. Cora Kaplan on how maybe we don't necessarily identify with characters in books, but sometimes with a structure, and Frederic Jameson's 'affect', the sense of being there in the story in a suspended moment, as against the chronological progression of the plot -– these really helped me put my finger on elements of my reading experience which I've long experienced but never really seen anatomised before. Elsewhere, though, we get into murkier waters, occasionally accompanied by some almost comically unhelpful diagrams.

Yet even here McGurl will frequently pull out of an apparent death spiral, perhaps by moving within a page from the depths of sodding Barthes to "Barbara Deloto and Thomas Newgen's rigorously cheerful self-published novella The House of Enchanted Feminization" – along with a brief explanation of the ways in which it's distinct from darker works in the same sub-subgenre. Discussing the attempted legal land-grab known as #cockygate – of which, gods help me, I was already somewhat aware – he becomes quite animated. "It was after all based on one word of a book title, a word that already in any case been used in 2015, in Penelope Ward and Vi Keeland's delightful Cocky Bastard (There is no justice in the literary field – this novel is far superior to Fifty Shades of Grey, let alone the idiotic Cocky Roomie, with a real sense of humor as well as a sidekick role filled by a blind baby goat)." In short, he cares about this stuff, and has read it as a reader, not just a tourist or researcher. Sturgeon's Law is not namechecked, but McGurl's very familiar with the principle: as he puts it himself, "Among the many who write fiction as though vaguely remembering a TV show are some who really surprise you with the vividness and individuality of their imagined worlds." Nor does he make any effort to deny the corollary – I 100% share his only mildly childish delight in pointing out that litfic is a genre too, and that "We all know how bad a "literary" novel can be." One of his early examples is Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, Mackenzie; I had known that she was a novelist, and an early and integral part of Amazon as a company, but I've never seen this sort of detailed work on her output, "militantly literary fiction" which will show a loaded gun, then studiously ensure it never does anything so vulgar as go off. Later, by way of comparison with the easily mocked field of alpha billionaire romance, McGurl considers a certain far more respectable and literary strain of books, and if I still slightly prefer the genre heading of 'sad boner professor books', I can appreciate the symmetry of his coinage, 'beta intellectual romance'. Doubly so his descriptions of how the male protagonists here approach women: "They do not want to whip them, just to waste their time."

This is the delight of the book as a read – well, at least when it's steering clear of Barthes. It is at once incredibly idiosyncratic and absolutely big-picture thinking, shamelessly attention-grabbing and deeply thought through. "There is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature" is an eye-catching chapter opening, but lines like that lure the reader in just like an explosive opening to a Kindle Unlimited novel must, and boy does McGurl know his Kindle Unlimited novels. I had been mercifully unaware of the existence of LitRPG, for instance - essentially a whole genre derived from Ready Player One, which McGurl is probably fair to identify as "a fantasy of meritocracy". But what could easily have been an opportunity to point and laugh at the no-hopers and weirdos is (almost) always careful to turn the mirror to the reader of terribly clever and respectable books and ask how much real difference there is. Unlike many self-defined Marxists, McGurl remembers that Marx was impressed with capitalism's achievements even as he objected to its errors and excesses, and himself takes a similar view of Amazon, which he doesn't defend, but also doesn't boycott. More widely, he knows that consumption is a real pleasure, and that there's a snobbishness in refusing to acknowledge as much, as also in not accepting that many people read primarily for pleasure, and why shouldn't they? On 'the genre turn' whereby carefully finessed SF or horror or crime books can now be taken seriously by literary types, he asks why romance never seems to have been afforded the same leeway, despite having spent so long as the primary engine of many books still considered canonical today – and aside from its readership slanting female even more than the readership of fiction in general, he concludes that part of the issue is a fundamental resistance to taking anything with a happy ending seriously, and isn't that ridiculous? As he says: "Critique chugs along, fed by the infinite coal-supply of capitalism's contradictions. It's just that critique should be as thoroughly dialectical as it can, as suspicious of its own suspicion as of anything else." Sometimes it's OK just to like things because they're cute or cosy. Yes, novels may be an escape, but reading is still a real experience among others, and why on Earth not seek out comforting experiences over grim ones, at least sometimes?

Of course, it can't be denied that ultimately, none of us outside the pages do get a happy ending. Thinking too hard about opportunity cost always makes me feel terribly mortal, and there's plenty here on the grim implications of 'time is money' in an age when the former is far more limit than the latter on our reading. Seldom have I felt so called out as by the line "The overstuffed Kindle e-reader or iPad is at once a world-historically powerful condensation of potential literary experience and a little tombstone prophesying the rapidly approaching day of our death." This even before we get into the unknown and unknowable quantity of dead books, lurking unfavoured by the algorithms, destined never to be read by anyone but their writer-uploaders. Still, on the whole I found this a strangely affirming read. "We need novels like we need food to eat and clothing and shelter – at least some of us do, numbering in the hundreds of millions." And with all the other demands on our time now, isn't that quite something?

This was my first book to read by this author and I can’t wait to read more!! The characters are so well written and really stick with you long after you finish this unique story. Do yourself a favor and read this now!!

Informative and insightful, of patent interest to anyone invested in publishing and what's to become of it; McGurl's inquiry packs a powerful punch, and many of the points brought up point to more unnerving prospects for the industry than most of us imagine.