Amazon Accuses Someone Else of Monopolizing Bookselling
The Authors Guild slams Amazon for coming out against the settlement between the Guild and and Google Books.
“Amazon’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry. At this moment it’s trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss. It won’t do that forever, of course. Eventually, when enough readers are locked in to its Kindle, everyone in the industry expects Amazon to squeeze publishers and authors. The results could be devastating for the economics of authorship.”
Publishers Weekly has much more on the controversy. The Rumpus is basically against the settlement, but more because we don’t understand it. Maybe that’s our own fault, but someone should have communicated things more clearly. And the guild’s lawyers being paid $30 million left a bad taste in our mouth. $30 million is a lot of author health insurance.
But now that Amazon has come out against the settlement we might change our tune. The enemy our enemy…
September 9th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Google has done one thing Amazon has not: Massively violated the copyrights of locatable authors and publishers of books still in print, then set up the Settlement to grab publication rights when Google–not the copyright owner–declares the book out of print. Print-on-demand books can be declared out of print according to the Settlement.