According to
Bookseller editor Philip Jones and others quoted in this recent
Guardian article:
"New Amazon Terms Amount to 'Assisted Suicide' for Book Industry"
Quote:
Amazon is putting publishers under "heavy pressure" to introduce new terms. The Bookseller reports that these include the proviso that "should a book be out of stock from the publisher, Amazon would be entitled to supply its own copies to customers via its print-on-demand facilities", and that "books cannot be sold for a lower price than Amazon's anywhere, including on a publisher's own website". . . .
Philip Jones said the ongoing negotiations "indicate a direction of travel that would see [Amazon] take a sizeable control over both a publisher's inventory and its marketing", and that . . . "This is a form of assisted suicide for the book business, driven by the idea that publishers are a sickly lot unable to run even the most basic operations efficiently."
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