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The problem with people like this guy is that they make even reasonable points sound ridiculous.
Take the "Amazon hurts authors" thing, for instance. On the face of it, this is ridiculous: Amazon provides a self-publishing platform to authors who might never be published, and provides it to them free of charge and at higher royalty rates than the traditional publishers provide. That's not hurting authors, that's helping them!
And yet... Amazon isn't the indie author's best friend and close lover. The royalty rates are very frustrating to me: I would prefer to price under 2.99 but that's the 70% sweet spot. And if Google sells my book for less than that (and apparently they can), Amazon can slash my price to match and cut my royalty rate by half.
And I don't even get 70%, because Amazon takes "delivery charges" off the top that effectively penalize me for including images in my book since the charge is based on book size. And supposedly this charge will only go up with their new format, as it's apparently a bigger file size.
I can't participate in the lending library unless I promise Amazon total exclusivity of my title. And if Amazon's exclusivity manages to do the real work of putting B&N out of competition, I have zero doubt that Amazon will bring the royalty rates down with even more blatant chipping away. Why wouldn't they? It's a business, after all.
Amazon doesn't "hurt" authors and it sounds ludicrous to me for someone to say so. But the "help" they provide is carefully calculated to help Amazon first and authors as a byproduct. It's a symbiotic relationship, but one in which one party is dominant and another party is individually expendable. And authors should be forewarned and given the tools necessary to make smart decisions.
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