I recommend reading Orwell's full essay here: <a href="http://vintagepenguins.blogspot.com.au/p/review-of-penguin-books.html" rel="nofollow">http://vintagepenguins.blogspot.com.au/p/review-of-penguin-b...</a> It's well written, because of course it's Orwell, and while he was certainly wrong in 1937, six years later he was cheerfully writing to Penguin about the best books for them to reprint: <a href="http://georgeorwellnovels.com/letters/letter-to-penguin-books-8-march-1943" rel="nofollow">http://georgeorwellnovels.com/letters/letter-to-penguin-book...</a><p>Meanwhile, George Bernard Shaw was saying the cheaper books were, the better, and J. B. Priestley was calling Penguin "a grand publishing feat." Amazon is rewriting history when they say the literary establishment hated paperbacks.<p>And, of course, Orwell was the last man in the world one could reasonably accuse of being a pawn of corporate interests. He was a revolutionary and a socialist who went to Spain to fight against fascists. He was uncompromising in his examination of even his fellow travelers: 1984 is a criticism of the Soviet Union and abstract leftist thought.<p>Finally, if you're going to invoke Orwell, you should have the intellectual honesty to link to both people who agree with you and people who disagree with you. You should also not call yourself Readers United. I'm a reader; I have some sympathies with Amazon, but I am not united behind this any more than all authors are part of Authors United.