[Kali Yuga]

Wow. Just... wow.

Wing Press (owned by the author of the article) is very small and is benefitting greatly from ebooks. We're not talking about Random House here, or a publisher who steadfastly refuses to get into ebooks.

IPG is a consortium of small publishers. Working with IPG gives a small press like Wing better access to distribution and retailers.

Is merely the act of being a "publisher" -- regardless of size, specialty and attitude towards ebooks -- sufficient to brand them as "stupid," and subject to whatever whims a huge retailer like Amazon imposes?

Originally Posted by Blue Tyson

"We were too dumb to learn to sell directly to readers and we didn't want to either. Guess that wasn't too clever."

Wing does have its own ebook store and does sell directly to the public.

That strategy doesn't work well anyway, unless you're catering to a niche market like SF (Baen) or technical guides (O'Reilly) or romance (eHarlequin). Random House has top market share, at around 18%; a Random House ebook store would have roughly 1/4 of the top sellers. Why would that be a prime retail destination?

The real problem is that Amazon has such a lock on the market, that getting booted has cut Wing's sales by 40%. If the publishers get replaced by Amazon and 1 or 2 other big retailers, we're going to end up with a far more consolidated industry than we've already got.

I don't know if this will truly strangle output or content. But it doesn't seem like the kind of thing folks 'round here usually want.

Originally Posted by crossi

"pulled the plug" on their books? Idiots.... If Amazon had continued to sell their products it would have opened them to a major lawsuit about their illegal behavior.

Yes, Amazon is legally entitled to remove the titles. What Milligan is protesting is not that fact, but that Amazon is demanding what he regards as an unacceptably high cut of sales. He also believes that Amazon is trying to kill off small/indie publishers (which may or may not be the case).

Originally Posted by howyoudoin

So, the article ends with a contradiction to the claims of Amazon being a monopoly that forces draconian rules onto independent publishers, thereby invalidating the premise of the entire article up to this point.

The article is trying to say, "Don't buy exclusively from Amazon, don't let them have a monopoly." There is no contradiction.

Originally Posted by HappyMartin

How hard is it to sell a book without Amazon?

Pretty tough. Amazon allegedly has 60-70% of the ebook market.

Originally Posted by JoeD

If you don't like what amazon is doing, don't do business with them, there's plenty of alternatives. We sell apps but because we don't agree with Amazons T&C we don't do business with them. No loss to us, no loss to them.

There are alternatives, but that doesn't change the fact that Amazon is a big player in the ebook market, and losing access to Amazon as a retailer means leaving lots of money on the table.

It'd be like pulling an iOS version of your app and only selling an Android version, because Apple demanded two or three times its current cut of your sales. It's your choice to decide whether to handle that stoically or discuss it in public, yes?