Amazon.com Fail

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.

Add this to
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.

Reading is Doomed!

I read a poll that said people were reading less. It was done by a newspaper, and people were in fact reading newsprint less. They were reading online news websites and blogs far more. The conclusion is that reading was doomed. No, dudes, reading print is fading, but not doomed. There's still the place for bathtub reading because you do NOT want to drop your PDA or e-book reader into the tub. A book so dropped becomes a soggy book. A PDA so dropped becomes loss of your electronic memory unit. Now, when they have a water-proof computer screen on an arm that can swing out over the tub, then I'd worry about the doomedness of print.