How The Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World transformed the careers of two giants of American literature.
Jeff Bezos did not create the world’s biggest bookstore out of a deep love of literature. I interviewed him in his Seattle office back when he was the crown prince of the dot-com crowd and recall seeing only one book in it: “Destiny’s Road,” by the science fiction writer Larry Niven, about a planet colonization attempt gone awry.
If books were not a passion for Bezos, it seems that owning a newspaper does not rank high either. Last month he fired more than a third of the journalists at The Washington Post, the paper he bought in 2013. That included the entire staff of the book review. Bezos said the purge was merely a question of numbers. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus,” he explained…
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