|
I also think most serious readers recognize that there's quite a bit of hear-say accusations in there. It may all be true, but Hachette, and Hachette's authors, would stand to benefit by making Amazon look bad and pressuring them to capitulate to a deal in Hachette's favor.
Hatchette also has a reputation for reader-antagonistic decisions (like their stance on DRM, or their subsidiary Orbit's decision to not include their books in the Hugo voting packet this year), so it's really hard to just accept their claims without some serious proof. All the proof offered so far is basically individual experiences lumped together to try to prove some grand scheme.
And some of the claims seem to be wrong, I saw an e-book by Hachette discounted at $1.99 just yesterday. It wasn't a pre-order or recent release either, and yet the Forbes article has a quote by an author claiming that's the only things Amazon is still discounting.
Other claims also fall apart on close study, like the thing with The Janson Option not having the Kindle edition show correctly. I've run into that with books many times, by pretty much every publisher, but in this particular case, if you search, the special five chapter preview seems to be linked to the hardback as a special free edition (shows $0.00 as the Kindle price) while the full Kindle edition is linked to the paperback. That does look like something Hachette themselves has managed to do, probably because of the special preview. Also, there's a third listing of the same book published by Macmillan. It would appear that the situation with that book is quite complicated, and not at all an example of Amazon foul play.
Finally, the shipping delays and low stock makes perfect sense. Amazon is negotiating a new contract, that new contract may lead to lower prices for them, so they're going to buy as little as possible in the interim to keep their costs down. Any retailer would do the same thing in that situation.
|