[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks - I wasn't aware that publishers other than Hachette were involved.

Other retailers do it, too. It's actually an old practice: no contract, no shelf-space.
Perfectly legal. (Just ask S&S authors with books released in early 2013.)

One less-bad thing about the silly hissy fight is it it drawing people out to point out all sorts of things:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kodi-s...m_hp_ref=books

To be fair, if a store refuses to carry Incendiary Girls, most will put in a special order--but only if a customer specifically requests the title--so the potential reader not only has to wait but must return at a later date. Barnes & Noble does sell it on their website, but their shipping time is longer than that of Amazon. Sound familiar? In essence, these stores have been delaying availability of certain titles for customers, just as Amazon is now doing with Hachette books. The hypocrisy is frustrating, to say the least.

I can certainly empathize with the Hachette authors--I've been dealing with this for months. I understand what it's like to be caught in the crossfire with little agency or control. I understand, more than most, what it's like to lose readers and revenue.

But I don't understand why the literati are up in arms. Amazon took a page from their competitors' playbook, doing what Barnes & Noble and other stores have been doing to Amazon-affiliated titles for months. And now, many folks consider the Hachette feud to be a sign of the literary end times--

And then there's this quote from last year:

Laura Gross, the literary agent for the best-selling author Jodi Picoult, said the dispute had certainly hurt sales of her client’s latest book, “The Storyteller.” Barnes & Noble has “taken limited orders, limited placement, and did not do the normal outreach to their customers online, which really hurt,” Ms. Gross said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/bo...ales.html?_r=0

The practice is actually common. Most affected publishers just keep on negotiating and don't make a spectacle of their impotence. Sometimes retailers even join up to boycott a publisher's entire catalog for what *they* feel is good reason. Perfectly legal, nobody cries. Nobody accuses them of hurting authors or destroying literary culture.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...-boycott-grows

AMAZON Publishing doesn't whine about the boycott of their titles that B&N orchestrated and their authors know that's part of the reason for the higher royalty rates. It annoys them but they don't waste time and goodwill throwing public tantrums.