Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
How could it be that on the book I'm watching (Instinct by Jakes, not meant as a recommendation), I see Amazon doubling and halving the estimated shipping time from day to day. 1-2 weeks, 2-4 weeks, 3-5 weeks, 4-6 weeks, 1-2 months, I've seen them all, back and forth. This can't plausibly be based on knowledge. Knowledge does not change that fast. It's much more plausible that it is part of negotiating to get better prices from a supplier.
Does that make Amazon evil? No. Is a squeezed Hachette going to make me less well entertained? No again. But will a squeezed Hachette make me less well informed? Maybe, although not by much, as they seem, at least in English, overwhelmingly oriented towards fiction and advice books.
Would a squeezed Simon & Schuster make we less well-informed? There I think the answer would be yes. While their stockholders would take some of the hit, it's more than plausible that a squeezed Simon & Schuster or Random House would accept fewer non-fiction book proposals and/or lower advances authors need to finance their research.
Before getting involved in these discussions, I rarely noticed who published what I read. I probably would have greatly overestimated how much I read from is from university presses. But now I see that my interests are middlebrow, and that I do tend to like books from a couple of big publishers.
If you don't like their product, don't consume it. If you can't afford it, wait a couple years for the price to go down, or get it from the library. Problem solved.
Now back to reading The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel. Penguin Books. This I do recommend.
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So you still have nothing but your own beliefs and even more hand-waving in new directions as "proof" of Hatchette's "quick" shipping times. Sorry, I find this latest speculation less convincing than your previous assertions.