Year after year, Amazon has been chosen as one of the most reliable companies today. Just don’t tell some publishers that.
That’s right it’s Amazon vs. Publishers! The main publisher Amazon is beefing with is Hachette Book Group. It’s one of the top five biggest book publishers in the world today. Amazon discourages readers from buying books from Hachette. But now it’s escalating. It will be very difficult to buy Hachette books for the next several months. Even the promotion of some books have been deleted. It’s being reported the same thing is happening to a German publisher called Bonnier Media Group. One publisher calls Amazon’s actions extortion. A member of The Authors Guild says, ?Amazon clearly has substantial market power and is abusing that market power to maintain and increase its dominance, which likely violates Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.”? From as far as I can tell, there has been no comment from Amazon.
This is what we at Computer Geeks have been saying for quite a while. When a company gets this kind of power, look at how easy that power can be used and abused. I don’t know who fired the first shot here, whether it was Amazon or Hachette. But what I do know is that it’s the innocent who is going to get hurt. It’s going to be the writer whose trying to make a living through book sales or it’s the consumer who wants to read that author’s books. There are several people who are always hurt by this type of fight, none of whom asked for this. So for their sakes, I hope both sides can act more like educated businessman and less like second graders and resolve this issue before everyone suffers.?The question is which side will decide to be the bigger person here?