The Kindle Trap: How Publishers Made Digital Reading Impossible to Escape

By Andy — 2026-08-06 — Literary News

I was shelving books last week when a stack of paperbacks slipped and scattered across the floor.

That moment—the weight of them, the minor chaos—reminded me why I've been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to read more digitally.

Moving an apartment full of books teaches you things you don't want to learn. Heavy things. I made a promise afterward: shift to digital reading, reduce the physical footprint, simplify. It's been six years since I tried this during lockdown. Nothing has changed. The market hasn't budged.

Amazon Kindle controls roughly 72% of the e-reader market, a figure that would seem dramatic if it weren't so thoroughly boring by now.

Barnes & Noble's NOOK has already vanished entirely from the conversation.

So here's what I did: I opted out. Bought an iPad, told myself this would be my reading device—no notifications, no distractions, just the Kindle app running quietly in the background. Moral gymnastics: I'll avoid buying an Amazon device but I'm perfectly fine with Apple.

Let's be honest. The Kindle app is simply better than anything else available. Functionally superior. That's not worth celebrating; it's worth resenting.

The real work happens on NetGalley, the platform that connects publishers with reviewers, librarians, and industry professionals seeking digital galley proofs before publication. Nearly every pitch comes with a link there. Request the book, it lands in your account, send it to your Kindle address—because yes, even if you don't own a Kindle device, Amazon gives every user a cloud storage address—and suddenly you're reading on their infrastructure anyway.

Publishers don't care what you use to read, only that you read. They ship their books to NetGalley, which works beautifully with Kindle, which is the default experience for most people who aren't thinking very hard about which corporate ecosystem they're funding.

Sometimes a publisher sends a PDF. I email it to my Kindle address. Sometimes, like when Drawn & Quarterly sent Lisa Hanawalt's forthcoming graphic memoir, the format works almost perfectly on a tablet. Almost. The convenience erases the moral complaint.

The market has engineered itself so thoroughly that opting out requires constant vigilance and small hypocrisies. You can buy a Kobo. You can read on a Boox device. You can pretend the alternatives actually matter. But the infrastructure—the content distribution, the reviewer previews, the entire system that keeps publishing moving—runs on Kindle compatibility by default. It's not a conspiracy. It's just what happens when one player holds three-quarters of the market and does the job competently.

The book world hasn't changed since 2020. The dominance has only settled in deeper, quieter, less contested.