![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I first came across this a couple of days ago while browsing my Twitter feed, a rare event. Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Games was writing a lot about it. Nasty stuff, makes me glad that we buy from Barnes & Noble and another chain when we can.
"Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as 'unavailable.' In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher."
I'll be honest: I'm of very mixed feeling re: Amazon. My main objection has been the genocide of mom & pop book stores, but they have many business practices that I'm not exactly sanguine about. The genocide wasn't Amazon's fault, it began when B. Dalton and Waldenbooks started growing and became Barnes & Noble and Borders. Then along comes Bezos and Amazon destroys Borders and is close to doing in B&N. Some small chains have found places where they survive, we have one such here called Hastings. And while we do drop a fair amount of coin there, they are an endless source of frustration for my wife and I. A couple of years ago Bujold had a new book coming out on my wife's birthday, the release date was confirmed through Bujold's web site, Amazon, and B&N. Hastings told us to our face that they wouldn't be getting it for two months. So it was ordered from Amazon. And don't get me started on gripes about Kindles.
We buy a lot of non-entertainment from Amazon, right now I'm wearing a pair of sweat pants that I couldn't find locally. Sweat pants. What a ridiculously trivial item, yet I shopped in three different cities for them and couldn't find what I needed. I love the used book marketplace that Amazon provides, I recently got a training manual for a slightly older piece of software from some used bookstore that otherwise would have been hard to track down, and it was a drop kick finding it on Amazon. I've ordered lots of used books on Amazon, but only after I scour my regular supply of used bookstores and come up empty.
I guess it boils down to this: I could live without Amazon, but I don't want to. But if they continue their rectal haberdashery ways, I may put it to the test.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/23/1743225/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-publishers
"Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as 'unavailable.' In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher."
I'll be honest: I'm of very mixed feeling re: Amazon. My main objection has been the genocide of mom & pop book stores, but they have many business practices that I'm not exactly sanguine about. The genocide wasn't Amazon's fault, it began when B. Dalton and Waldenbooks started growing and became Barnes & Noble and Borders. Then along comes Bezos and Amazon destroys Borders and is close to doing in B&N. Some small chains have found places where they survive, we have one such here called Hastings. And while we do drop a fair amount of coin there, they are an endless source of frustration for my wife and I. A couple of years ago Bujold had a new book coming out on my wife's birthday, the release date was confirmed through Bujold's web site, Amazon, and B&N. Hastings told us to our face that they wouldn't be getting it for two months. So it was ordered from Amazon. And don't get me started on gripes about Kindles.
We buy a lot of non-entertainment from Amazon, right now I'm wearing a pair of sweat pants that I couldn't find locally. Sweat pants. What a ridiculously trivial item, yet I shopped in three different cities for them and couldn't find what I needed. I love the used book marketplace that Amazon provides, I recently got a training manual for a slightly older piece of software from some used bookstore that otherwise would have been hard to track down, and it was a drop kick finding it on Amazon. I've ordered lots of used books on Amazon, but only after I scour my regular supply of used bookstores and come up empty.
I guess it boils down to this: I could live without Amazon, but I don't want to. But if they continue their rectal haberdashery ways, I may put it to the test.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/23/1743225/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-publishers
