- 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.”
Another writeup with more information. http://www.vox.com/2014/5/24/5746868/9-questions-about-amazon-and-hachette-you-were-embarassed-to-ask
I can't say that I'm surprised. Combine shady business practices, general douchebaggery, highly aggressive business tactics, and insane amount of power and you end up with a situation where everyone loses. Amazon can do whatever it wants and both consumers and publishers will have to give in. Let's see what the antitrust guys and regulators do (when they finally enter this century and figure out how the internet works).
Is there any plausible explanation for why Amazon has not yet jacked up prices and cashed in on its diabolical plan to dominate all commerce? Even the most vocal critics can't stop shopping at the "malignant monopoly." Surely by now they have achieved a critical mass of market penetration. Amazon has been aggressively pleasing customers from the start, and the predicted disasters always seem to recede into the future.Amazon can do whatever it wants and both consumers and publishers will have to give in.
May I request a bit of nuance here?