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Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I disagree. In my opinion, Amazon has no obligation to provide content to its competitors. Exclusivity deals run rampant in the publishing world. Should all publishers be required to sell their books in all formats and to all customers?
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Amazon the retailer doesn't have to, but Amazon the publisher does because the retailers are not the competition of the publisher.
It's not like this is the first time when Amazon
acted badly:
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In March 2008, Amazon informed many small and medium sized presses using POD that, if they wanted their books listed and sold through Amazon, they would have to use a company called BookSurge for their printing. It’s probably no surprise that BookSurge had been purchased by Amazon in 2005. The initial communication from Amazon was though highly deniable channels, phone calls, mostly, and some carefully phrased emails. When word of it got out, there was a huge outcry on the part of publishers and authors. Federal anti-trust agencies got involved and there was a major lawsuit that dragged on for years. The end result was that Amazon backed off (though they continued to hold people to contracts that had been signed because of their threats), the suit was settled out of court, and things were back to normal. Oh, and Amazon changed the name from BookSurge to CreateSpace to get away from the bad publicity.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by calibrated
Right now, it doesn't affect me--my favorite authors don't publish through Amazon--but someday, it might. And that's why I'm calling a pox on both their houses. Amazon is holding authors hostage ("you can't sell your books there"), and B&N is blackmailing them ("that's a nice book ya got there, it'd be a terrible shame if nobody had a chance to buy it"). Both are reprehensible.
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Amazon didn't take the authors hostage, it bought them. B&N isn't blackmailing them, it's just saying that if they refuse to allow it to sell ebooks, it won't but the books in the physical stores.
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Originally Posted by markbot
Too bad Amazon couldn't just take out B&N via hostile takeover and then just liquidate them. Amazon's stock is overpriced right now, so they could pay like $20 per share in equity...but in reality that would only be like paying B&N shareholders $10 per share, lol. B&N is 1% of Amazon's market cap...it would be barely a dent...and the value added for Amazon would be way over 1% if they managed this coup. Of course, the justice department would never allow this to happen.
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Amazon doesn't want a physical presence because then they would have to pay taxes.