Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement
There is some marvelous commentary over at Making Light, a blog run by Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. John Scalzi weighs in with some pithy comments (full post):
Amazon apparently forgot that when it moved against Macmillan, it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales...These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long.
Boy did they. It's been fun reading.
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Amazon calls mistake 'embarrassing and ham-fisted', a "computer glitch," Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others, another computer-listing glitch, and other assorted maladroit, 500-pound gorilla tactics by a book source I will avoid patronizing (they may, someday, have something I absolutely cannot survive without, or they may get a clue; also, saying things like "I will never..." has a tendency to bite back, down the road). Amazon is a great resource. But they are no longer alone on the internet, and others have better pricing. I choose to display my displeasure this way.
For other book-aholics like me, there's Book Mooch, for trading books all over the world, the only cost is the shipper pays postage, my beloved Gutenberg Project, Book View Cafe, for an assortment of ebooks, and Audiobook Town Square, which I confess is owned by a friend.
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