Amazon used to be the little guy in the book business. All those book mega-chains were gaining too much influence, so the industry welcomed an Internet upstart that launched by mailing books out of Jeff Bezos’ garage. Times have changed and the plot has thickened “The dispute between Amazon and the publishers is a dispute between an e-commerce giant and companies that have for generations been printing text on paper. In some respects it is also a dispute between the East Coast and the West Coast. It is definitely a dispute between hyper-capitalism and cultural conservation. But in the end it is a dispute that comes down to different visions of the future of the written word.” In Vanity Fair, Keith Gessen looks at the public spat between Amazon and Hachette and the war of the words.