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Some of the pain is certainly self inflicted, just look at Suhrkamp and their internal squabbles.
With the Tolino the book retailers finally seem to have realized that they can't ignore ebooks any longer. The Tolino may still have some room for improvement, but it is quite good to start with and they command the shop floor in the bookshops.
I seriously dislike Amazon for the dodgy tax deal they made with Luxembourg. The price for the end customer is the same, with Amazon pocketing the 16% difference in VAT. Tax dodging seems to be one of the foundations of their business model. Apart from that Amazon is mostly creating crap jobs, poorly paid warehouse slaves and exploited delivery people. The kicking Amazon got in the national media for their poor employment conditions wasn't nearly as bad as they deserved.
I almost never buy books from them. I appreciate that my city of 300,000 still has at least a dozen bookshops, most of them independently owned. That is where I get my books; same price as Amazon + overnight delivery and maintaining decent jobs in the community.
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