If you know anything about the Raven bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, then you know that it charges more for books than Amazon. Advertising higher prices is an unlikely strategy for any business, but Danny Caine, the Raven’s owner, has an M.F.A., not an M.B.A., and he talks openly with customers about why his books cost as much as they do. Two years ago, he took that conversation to social media, using the store’s Twitter account to explain why the Raven was charging twenty-six ninety-nine for a hardcover book that a customer had seen online for fifteen dollars. “When we order direct from publishers, we get a wholesale discount of 46% off the cover price,” Caine wrote. “Our cost for that book from the publishers would be $14.57. If we sold it for $15, we’d make . . . 43 cents.” Caine estimated that, with an inventory of some ten thousand books in the store, on a profit of less than fifty cents a book, the Raven could afford to stay open for about six days.

Amazon has a much larger inventory—not only of books but of other goods with much higher profit margins—as well as many other revenue streams. The company can afford to take a loss on books. “If you’ve ever wondered why it seems like ‘there are no bookstores anymore’ or why retail businesses keep closing in your downtown, this is it,” Caine wrote. The Raven can’t afford losses like Amazon, but almost every dollar that the store makes stays in Kansas: after the publisher’s cut, half of every book sold goes directly to employee wages; the other half goes to rent, marketing, and other operating costs, including store maintenance, the Web site, and food and veterinary care for the Raven’s most famous employees, the cats Dashiell (as in Hammett) and Ngaio (as in Marsh).

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Those chapters were easy. The others were harder. “Obviously, Amazon isn’t going to cease to exist,” Caine told me. “So what exactly was I arguing for?” An antitrust symposium organized by the A.B.A. exposed Caine to the work of Matt Stoller, who wrote “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” and David Dayen, the author of “Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.” Stoller’s book opens in Osawatomie, Kansas, not far from Lawrence, where President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in the summer of 1910, when he was dedicating the John Brown Memorial Park, in which he railed against monopolies and called for an economy that valued human welfare more than property rights. “I stand for the square deal,” Roosevelt said. “But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity.”

Caine found in Stoller’s and Dayen’s books a legislative framework for remedying what struck him as the unfair advantages Amazon had over the Raven. But the authors also revealed how consumer prices were not the only, or even the best, metrics of the harm that companies like Amazon inflict on smaller competitors, their own employees, and consumers. Other concerns are worth regulating, too, including the degraded quality of consumer goods, lax copyright and counterfeiting enforcement, decreased worker safety, depressed wages, and the treatment of third-party sellers. Additionally, when it comes to books, Amazon not only sells them but publishes them: the company markets thousands of exclusive e-books and audiobooks, including ones from high-profile authors like Dean Koontz and Trevor Noah, cutting out independent booksellers and refusing to license the books to public libraries.