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New authors, building their customer base, need physical bookshops. Physical bookshops are lovely, tactile, friendly, expert, welcoming places. Physical books, which can only be seen and handled in physical bookshops, are lovely, tactile things. Destroy those bookshops – and Amazon is acting to achieve just that – and the very commercial and cultural base to the book industry is destroyed
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New authors merely need a way to reach their audience. We don't care if it is a physical shop or internet or mail or little green aliens delivering it to readers doorsteps.
Right now Amazon and B&N and Sony, Kobobooks and a few others provide that portal to the customer. Right now they're paying authors a decent cut of sales. But. Amazon's move to get indie and backlist authors exclusive? Scary. Now I'm not saying they are planning on cutting commissions as soon as they control the market, but the thought occurs that if you control the market, you control the market.
Amazon hasn't destroyed the book market; they've made it more interesting, easier to get books, faster to get books out and better.
For now. It's the "for later" part that I'm keeping my eye on.